Preamble

The House met at half-past Two o'clock

PRAYERS

[Mr. SPEAKER in the Chair]

Oral Answers to Questions — ORAL ANSWERS TO QUESTIONS

Mr. Speaker: Before we begin Question Time, may I make an appeal to the House for briefer supplementary questions, otherwise I shall have to call fewer supplementaries?

SCOTLAND

Domestic Rates

Mr. Teddy Taylor: asked the Secretary of State for Scotland what estimate he has made of the average domestic rate payment per householder in the current financial year; and what were the comparable amounts five and 10 years previously.

The Secretary of State for Scotland (Mr. Bruce Milan): I estimate that the average domestic rate payment per householder in Scotland in 1978–79 will be about £119, excluding domestic water rate, which is a decrease of £9 compared with about £128 last year. The comparable figures for 1973–74 and 1968–69 were £65 and £41 respectively.

Mr. Taylor: Does the right hon. Gentleman agree that rates have now become an intolerable burden for many families, particularly in areas hard hit by revaluation which have not had the advantage of the overall reduction to which he referred? Since the Government have now had the Layfield Report for a considerable time, can he say whether there are any plans to review the rating system?

Mr. Milian: We have already said that there are certain aspects of the rating system which we shall continue to examine, but we have no plans to replace or modify it in a significant way.

I had hoped that the hon. Gentleman would acknowledge the reduction in domestic rates in the current year. If he is worried, as no doubt he is, about the burden of rates on householders, I am sure he will welcome the reduction.

Mr. Grimond: Does the Secretary of State agree that his figures show huge discrepancies in the rate burden in Scotland? Certainly in my constituency there has been a steep increase in rates. When the Government examine the Layfield Report, will they look at alternative methods of raising local government finance, as suggested in that report?

Mr. Milian: That subject has been gone over in a detailed fashion in recent years. The Layfield Committee came to the conclusion that the rating system should continue. I am aware that in different parts of Scotland revaluation has had varying consequences, including the consequences experienced in the right hon. Gentleman's constituency. However, domestic ratepayers overall are paying less this year than they paid last year.

Mr. Lambie: Is my right hon. Friend aware that certain business men in Troon have stated that the Strathclyde assessor has acted illegally in using capital values instead of rental values in determining the valuation of properties in Troon? In view of that fact, will my right hon. Friend reconsider his previous decision not to hold a public inquiry into the rate position in areas such as Cunninghame, and especially in the town of Troon?

Mr. Millan: I do not see the need for a public inquiry. I repeat what I have said on numerous occasions previously—that those who are dissatisfied with their valuations should appeal. There is a statutory appeal procedure, and that is the way to go about the matter. I hope that those who are dissatisfied will use the procedure.

Mr. MacCormick: Does the right hon. Gentleman agree that his answer to the question put to him by the hon. Member for Glasgow, Cathcart (Mr. Taylor) will make sick reading to the people of Argyll, whose rates have increased hugely, partly as a consequence of the current revaluation? Does he appreciate that his answer is akin to the posture


adopted by Nero who fiddled while Rome burned?

Mr. Milan: The hon. Member for Argyll (Mr. MacCormick) has a Question on this subject later on the Order Paper, namely, Question No. 19. We should wait until then and save time.

Scottish TUC

Mr. Monro: asked the Secretary of State for Scotland when he next expects to discuss unemployment with the Scottish Trades Union Congress.

Mr. Milan: I attended the STUC conference in April, but I have no arrangements at present for a further meeting with the genearl council.

Mr. Monro: Is the right hon. Gentle man aware that unemployment in Scotland has risen by over 100,000 since October 1974 and that in the last month it has gone up by 530 a day? Is he blind to the fact that this is basically because of the Government's mishandling of the economy? Welcome though temporary employment schemes are, does he not agree that they are not a long-term cure?

Mr. Milian: I have said on numerous occasions that unemployment is too high. The hon. Gentleman will know that in the current year in Scotland the seasonally adjusted figures have fallen considerably. Although last month's figure showed some stabilisation, I hope that we shall achieve further improvements.

Mr. David Steel: In view of the present totally unsatisfactory level of unemployment in Scotland, has the Secretary of State made any estimate of what would be the additional unemployment if the 51 per cent. take-over powers of the Scottish Development Agency were removed, as promised by the Conservative Party? Will he take it from me that in the Borders the non-availability of these powers would have had a very serious effect in four towns?

Mr. Milan: I am glad to hear that from the right hon. Gentleman, because the SDA is involved with companies in Scotland which are employing thousands of people, many of whom would not be in employment but for the activities of the SDA. Anyone who seeks to damage the powers of the SDA, as does the Con-

servative Party, is doing a grave disservice to the people of Scotland.

Mr. William Hamilton: Is my right hon. Friend aware that the Conservative Party looks increasingly absurd by seeking to blame the Government for unemployment in Scotland and elsewhere? Is it not obvious that this unemployment is due entirely to the international crisis and that the electors of Hamilton and Garscadden have given a definite answer to the Opposition in the last few months?

Mr. Milan: I agree with my hon. Friend, particularly on his latter point. I do not believe that anyone in Scotland thinks that the Conservative Party or the SNP has an answer to the unemployment problem.

Mr. Crawford: Does the Secretary of State agree that the scandalous unemployment figures in Scotland would be greatly reduced if the Government told the British Steel Corporation that it must not cut back its production targets at Ravenscraig from 3·2 million tons to 2·2 million tons, as is currently proposed?

Mr. Milian: The investment at Ravenscraig will take the present capacity of 1·5 million tons up to 3·2 million tons. The hon. Gentleman is careful to avoid mentioning that fact and is guilty of indulging in the most tendentious and misleading propaganda in Scotland on the whole steel industry. Only parliamentary convention prevents my saying what I really think about the hon. Gentleman and his statements on the steel industry.

Mr. Sillars: Is not the most appalling feature of the present situation the Government's complacency in the face of unemployment figures of the current magnitude? Has the Secretary of State forgotten everything he ever learned in the Socialist movement about the destructive and corrosive effects of 100 per cent. unemployment on each individual personality? Is it not the case that, aided and abetted by the hon. Member for Fife, Central (Mr. Hamilton), the objective of the Government is not to produce full employment but to get the people of Scotland to accept the present unacceptable levels?

Mr. Milian: I repudiate that. It is the Government's aim to get the level


of unemployment in Scotland significantly reduced. I am not in the least bit complacent about unemployment.

Mr. Teddy Taylor: Has not the Secretary of State got a nerve to answer as he has on unemployment when his Government were elected on a manifesto which stated that we could not tolerate the high levels of unemployment from which Scotland has suffered in the last 20 years? Does he agree that unemployment has more than doubled since he took office and that he has sat in the Cabinet and agreed to policies, such as the increased national insurance contributions, that will further increase unemployment in Scotland?

Mr. Milan: It is the hon. Gentleman who has a nerve considering that he voted against the plans for Chrysler, which employs 8,000 workers at Linwood, and the nationalisation of the shipbuilding industry, without which we would have lost between 10,000 and 20,000 jobs in Scotland. He and his party have voted against virtually every action taken by the Government to reduce unemployment.

Land Reform (Legislation)

Mr. Henderson: asked the Secretary of State for Scotland if he is satisfied with the effectiveness of present legislation on land reform.

The Under-Secretary of State for Scotland (Mr. Harry Ewing): The Conveyancing and Feudal Reform (Scotland) Act 1970 and the Land Tenure Reform (Scotland) Act 1974 have operated well.

Mr. Henderson: Has the Minister been following the articles in The Scotsman about the purchase of Scottish land by other interests, particularly Dutch interests? Do the Government, in general, favour this or disagree with it?

Mr. Ewing: I have been following with great interest the articles in The Scotsman, not only those written by journalists on the paper but the contributions made to the discussion by various members of the SNP. I noticed that the SNP has claimed that Scotland is the only country in Europe which allows what they describe as the indiscriminate purchase of land and that a nationality qualification should be attached to the ability to purchase land. In fact, there is only

one country in Europe with a nationality qualification for the purchase of land. That is Southern Ireland, which is reconsidering its position.

Mr. Buchan: On the question of ownership of land, would it not be helpful if we distinguished between land that belongs to the people and land that belongs to those who are prepared to exploit the people? If we look at it in this light, is there any difference between exploitation by a Dutchman and exploitation by the wealthy landowners, Scottish-born and with strong Scottish traditions and names? Is not the solution, particularly in regard to these large estates in the Highlands, a policy of public ownership and proper land reclamation?

Mr. Ewing: In the not-too-distant future—I am not sure of the date—the Highlands and Islands Development Board will be publishing its views on what should happen to land in the North and North-East of Scotland. I agree that exploitation by anyone, whether, as my hon. Friend has said, he wears a kilt or clogs, is exploitation of people, and it always surprises me that the SNP is prepared to defend those who wear the kilt and attack those who wear clogs.

A92, Dundee-Arbroath (Traffic)

Mr. Welsh: asked the Secretary of State for Scotland if he will give figures to show the volume of traffic on the A92 Dundee to Arbroath road; what was the date of this survey; and when he intends to institute a more up-to-date traffic survey on the road.

The Under-Secretary of State for Scotland (Mr. Frank N1cElhone): A total of 7,475 vehicles per day in May of this year, of which 13 per cent. were heavy goods vehicles. A further count will be taken in August.

Mr. Welsh: Is the Minister aware that local surveys have shown that his wrongheaded policy of detrunking the Dundee to Arbroath road will create massive problems for local road users and will mean that while the Government are grabbing the oil revenues, they are forcing their financial commitments on to the shoulders of local government? Can he now give a positive starting date for the Forfar by-pass, on the inland route which he prefers?

Mr. McElhone: That is not a fair description of the position. The hon. Gentleman must know that a public inquiry was held last year, when the reporter recommended that the inland route should be the trunk route and that the coastal route should be detrunked, though it will remain a trunk route until 1st April 1979. That is a fair compromise.

Mr. Buchanan-Smith: Leaving aside the trunk route choice considerations, may I point out that the oil industry, particularly in Montrose, is generating an enormous amount of traffic on this route, which led the reporter to describe the situation in Montrose as intolerable? Can the Minister give an assurance that in relation to developments on the coastal route, money will be available from oil-related funds to help meet the traffic problem that is being created by oil?

Mr. McElhone: Expenditure on roads in Scotland in 1976–77 was £192 million. That is not an inconsiderable sum. As for the position of Montrose, the hon. Gentleman has met my noble Friend who deals with this matter on a day-to-day basis, and a letter was sent to the local authorities concerned on 30th March indicating that consideration would be given to oil-related expenditure.

Housing (Homeless Persons) Act

Mr. Gourlay: asked the Secretary of State for Scotland if he has had any representations regarding the operation of the Housing (Homeless Persons) Act by the district councils in Scotland.

Mr. Milan: A number of local authorities have made representations about the working of the Act, but there is no evidence to suggest, given the sensitivity of the problems that can arise, that the Act is giving rise to undue difficulty.

Mr. Gourlay: Is my right hon. Friend aware that there appear to be wide discrepancies in the operation of the Act between several district authorities? Is he further aware that a number of my hon. Friends and I have received phone calls late on Saturday evenings from people who allege that they are walking the streets in our constituencies? Will he therefore consider providing national publicity to indicate the categories of home-

less people who are not covered by the Act?

Mr. Millan: I shall consider that, but I am not sure that this is a matter that should be dealt with by national publicity. I have already sent a circular of guidance to local authorities and we shall consider further guidance. The Act has been in operation for only about three months and one would expect a certain number of teething problems. I hope that the operation of the Act will settle down. I should also make the further simple point that before the Act came into operation there was widespread concern about the previous position. We did not move from a perfect position to an imperfect one—rather the opposite.

Mr. Rifkind: Is the right hon. Gentleman aware that a number of district councils are now interpreting the Act as allowing them to say that tenants who have been evicted for rent arrears have, in effect, made themselves homeless and should not benefit from the provisions of the Act? Does he believe that to be a correct interpretation of the Act?

Mr. Milan: I do not like to give legal interpretations on the Floor of the House, as the hon. Gentleman, who is a lawyer, will probably appreciate. There are a number of difficulties about certain categories of homelessness. In view of what my hon. Friend the Member for Kirkcaldy (Mr. Gourlay) and the hon. Gentle, man have said, I shall consider the matter to ascertain whether we need to issue more guidance to local authorities.

Mr. Dewar: I accept the overriding priority of housing the homeless, but does my right hon. Friend agree that there are genuine anxieties that certain areas may be used as reception areas or, as those in such areas might more crudely put it, dumping grounds, for families with considerable social problems? Will he give strict instructions to local authorities that the burden must be fairly shared and that there can be no question of areas that are already victimised or disadvantaged by having difficult-to-let housing stock having the problems aggravated by the operation of the Act?

Mr. Milian: Some of these problems predated the Act. The sort of problem to which my hon. Friend is referring has


been with us for some time. The social work department cannot contract out of its responsibilities. It no longer has the direct housing responsibility that it once had, but any Act of Parliament of this nature can operate successfully only if there is the closest co-ordination between the housing and social work departments. Emphasis has been placed upon that factor in the circular that we have issued.

Mr. Alexander Fletcher: To what extent is the problem of homelessness in Scotland due to the fact that under the Government house building has slumped to the lowest level since 1962?

Mr. Milan: That is a silly comment for the hon. Gentleman to make in this context.

Mr. Fletcher: It is true.

Nigg Refinery project

Mr. Dalyell: asked the Secretary of State for Scotland how much public money from all Government sources has been spent on Cromarty Petroleum's Nigg refinery project; and whether, in view of the fact that less than 70 per cent. of United Kingdom refinery capacity is being used, he will reconsider any plans, whereby the Nigg petrochemical project can attract Government grant.

The Minister of State, Scottish Office (Mr. Gregor MacKenzie): No public money has so far been spent on his project.

Mr. Dalyell: That is all right.

Mr. Gray: Is the right hon. Gentleman aware that commercial confidentiality has prevented any statement being made by the company, or by those likely to be associated with it in future ventures, on the Nigg Bay project? Will he confirm that there will be no discrimination against any company that wishes to make massive capital investment in Easter Ross in the national interest, so that we may properly proceed with the development of the area? Finally, will he pay scant attention to the comments of the hon. Member for West Lothian (Mr. Dalyell), who seems somewhat confused by his triple role—that of European parliamentarian, United Kingdom parliamentarian and a mouthpiece for British Petroleum at Grangemouth?

Mr. MacKenzie: It has already been made clear by my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State for Scotland and myself that we consider this to be a growth area within Scotland. Until such time as we have had applications from the company for regional development grants, which are dealt with by my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State for Industry, or for selective financial assistance, which is dealt with by my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State for Scotland, it would not be proper for me to anticipate any such applications.

Mr. Gordon Wilson: Is it not appropriate for the Minister in general terms to indicate what positive proposals he has for building up the petrochemical industry in Scotland, bearing in mind that there is a smaller proportion of employees in the industry in Scotland than in other parts of the United Kingdom?

Mr. MacKenzie: Ministers in the Department of Energy and in the Scottish Office have already made it clear that we see the project as an important development within Scotland. The studies that have already been made, which are now being examined by the Government, are an indication of the attitude that we are adopting to the work of the petrochemical industry.

Mr. Dalyell: Now that I am the mouthpiece for BP, may I confess that I am rather in favour of nationalised industries, as opposed to the Daniel K. Ludwig organisation of the United States?

Mr. Speaker: Confession is over.

Bathing Beaches (Sea Pollution)

Mr. Galbraith: asked the Secretary of State for Scotland to what extent the water off popular beaches in Scotland is polluted; and if he will make a statement.

Mr. Gregor MacKenzie: The extent to which popular bathing waters in Scotland are polluted is limited. Where conditions are not as good as they should be, improvement is being pursued by the relevant river purification board and sewerage authority.

Mr. Galbraith: Will the right hon. Gentleman explain why his Department is seeking to obtain exemption from EEC directives to create cleaner beaches? Surely a country such as Scotland which


depends so much on tourism should be leading the way instead of dragging its feet. Will the Minister care to come on a fact-finding mission with me and engage in a bathing party to see and to feel the degree of pollution that now exists?

Mr. MacKenzie: First, it is not true that we are seeking to avoid the consequences of any directives. It would be necessary to decide whether a directive applies to any Scottish beaches and, if so, what improvements are required under it. As for the hon. Gentleman's kindly invitation, I assure him that I am well aware of what is happening off the Ayrshire coast. I should point out that the Strathclyde Regional Council is now engaged on a major sewerage scheme costing well over £50 million, which will be beneficial to Ayrshire beaches.

Mr. Watt: Can the right hon. Gentleman assure the House that his Department is closely monitoring the insidious pollution that is taking place on both shores of the Forth? What is his Department prepared to do to stop oil constantly being spilt at Hunters Point?

Mr. MacKenzie: My Department, in conjunction with the Department of Trade, is conscious of the problems and we have teams that are working closely with the local authorities.

Mussels

Sir John Gilmour: asked the Secretary of State for Scotland whether he is satisfied that sufficient steps are being taken to increase the production of mussels in Scottish waters.

Mr. Millan: I am aware of the difficulties affecting production from Scottish waters but I believe there is scope for development of the market and improved returns to producers. This is primarily a matter for the shellfish industry.

Sir J. Gilmour: Does the right hon. Gentleman agree that, in spite of the difficulty that my hon. Friend the Member for Glasgow, Hillhead (Mr. Galbraith) has in finding clean beaches in Ayrshire, the majority of the waters of Scotland are exceptionally clean and suitable for shellfish cultivation? Is he satisfied that we do not need legislation to protect the rights of those who rear mussels artificially?

Mr. Millan: Yes, reasonably satisfied. I do not say that the position is completely free from doubt. However, I do not think that that is a major factor. The problem is that the prices fetched for mussels in the market are extremely low. I am not aware that I can do anything about that at present.

Scottish Assembly

Mr. Knox: asked the Secretary of State for Scotland what progress has been made in converting the Royal High School in Edinburgh for the proposed Scottish Assembly.

Mr. Millan: Progress is satisfactory. The second stage of the work described in the reply to my hon. Friend the Member for Glasgow, Pollok (Mr. White) on 10th March 1978 is about to be put in hand.

Mr. Knox: On present plans, what is the earliest date on which the building could be ready for sittings of the Scottish Assembly?

Mr. Milan: We are aiming for the spring of 1979.

Mr. David Steel: Will the Secretary of State confirm that the oval shape of the chamber is to be retained following the conversion work? If so, does he confirm that it is entirely suitable for a multiparty Assembly? Will he take account of what another place has done to the devolution Bill and ensure that the electoral system matches the shape of the new chamber?

Mr. Milan: The chamber is being retained in its present form. It will be suitable for all sorts of representation but I would not care to predict whether it will be multi-party.

Mr. Dalyell: If there is not a Labour majority, with which party does the Labour Party go into collision, the Tories or the SNP?

Mr. Milan: That is not likely to arise. Of course there will be a Labour majority.

Mr. Teddy Taylor: As a considerable sum of public money is involved, have the Government given any consideration to what use might be made of the building in the event of Scotland's rejecting the Assembly plan?

Mr. Milan: No, we have not given any consideration to that, because we do not think that it will arise.

Devolution (Scottish Executive)

Mr. Rifkind: asked the Secretary of State for Scotland what is the likely period after the proposed referendum on the Scotland Bill before he will transfer his powers to the new Scottish Executive in the event of an affirmative vote in the referendum.

Mr. Milan: Elections to the Scottish Assembly will first have to be held. Thereafter, once the Scottish Executive is in being, the period to elapse until the transfer of full responsibilities will be for discussion with the Executive.

Mr. Rifkind: Will the Secretary of State confirm that if, as we now expect, there is a General Election in the autumn, there will be no possibility of the referendum taking place until some time next year? In those circumstances, will he indicate the earliest date at which the Assembly could begin functioning?

Mr. Millan: I do not think that I should speculate on these matters, not every one of which is within my control. After the elections for the Assembly have been held, we envisage the take-over being quite a short period. I mean a period of a few months. I cannot be absolutely firm on that because we would have to discuss the arrangements with the Scottish Executive.

Mr. Gordon Wilson: Is the Secretary of State aware that the House of Lords is still up to its dirty work of mutilating the Scotland Bill? Does he realise that this House could take advantage of the changes in the referendum proposals which the House of Lords is making by suggesting that in the course of the campaign there should be some restriction over the amount of English money which is brought from London and elsewhere to be put to work in Scotland against the Assembly?

Mr. Milian: I am paying close attention to what is happening to the Bill in the other place. I am glad that the hon. Gentleman is still taking an interest in it, especially as, last week, he voted to kill the Bill.

Mr. Dewar: Does my right hon. Friend recall that there was a tandem period—

a running-in period—of about a year for the new regional councils? As the resettlement which will be required when the Assembly comes into being will be considerably more complicated, does he accept that something of that order will be necessary?

Mr. Milan: No. I have looked into this matter very carefully. I think that we can do it in less than a year. That may seem odd, given the local government experience, but I have to wait to talk to the Executive about it. I think that we can do it in considerably less than a year.

Mr. Alexander Fletcher: Is the Secretary of State aware that in Edinburgh it is considered that the Scottish Office is now planning the referendum for April next year? How does that fit in with his plans for March?

Mr. Milian: I do not know who is considering it. I am not.

Rheumatic Diseases

Mrs. Bain: asked the Secretary of State for Scotland what recent representations he has received on the treatment of rheumatic diseases in Scotland; and what action he intends to take in the light of the recently published report "Arthritis and Rheumatism, Everybody's Problem".

Mr. Harry Ewing: My right hon. Friend has received no general representations recently. The report is being studied by my Department.

Mrs. Bain: As the report indicates that the absence rate from work is 20 per cent. higher in Scotland than elsewhere in the United Kingdom as a result of these debilitating diseases and that 4 million working days are lost each year, do the Government see any way of increasing the grants made available for research into the causes and cure of rheumatism and arthritis? Will the Minister particularly consider the future of the Baird Street Clinic, in Glasgow, which has an international reputation in this area?

Mr. Ewing: It is well known that the eventual plan is to transfer the beds from the Baird Street Clinic to the new Royal Infirmary when that building is completed. Obviously that will be to everyone's advantage.
Research is the responsibility of the Medical Research Council. My Department finances research projects into the causes of rheumatism. Indeed, we have one or two research projects going at the moment. I shall certainly look at what the hon. Lady said.

Thalidomide Victims (Y List)

Mr. Thompson: asked the Secretary of State for Scotland how many persons in Scotland are now on the Y list of thalidomide victims.

Mr. Harry Ewing: Seven young people resident in Scotland are at present on the Y list.

Mr. Thompson: As the number of persons on the list is so small, as this is a once-for-all matter, and as the Distillers Company makes profits, what action is the Minister taking to help towards a generous settlement without any more needless legal and medical nit-picking?

Mr. Ewing: I am not sure whether the hon. Gentleman really understands the problem here. It is a matter between the parents of the young people and those who represent them and the Distillers Company Limited. It is a legal matter. The Government have little or no part to play in it. Those who were on the Y list have not yet had their cases decided by the court. Those are cases in which there is some dispute. There is no point in the hon. Member for Aberdeenshire, East (Mr. Henderson) nodding his head, because I strongly suspect that he does not know anything about the problem either.

Sporting Activities (Drug Taking)

Mr. Canavan: asked the Secretary of State for Scotland whether he will conduct an investigation into the use of drugs in Scottish football and other sports.

Mr. Dewar: asked the Secretary of State for Scotland if he will consult the Scottish Football Association, the Scottish Sports Council and other interested bodies with a view to introducing safeguards to eliminate any use of artificial stimulants in Scottish football and other sports.

Mr. McElhone: Responsibility for controlling the use of drugs in sport lies with the governing bodies of sport, including

the Scottish Football Association, acting in accordance with the rules of the appropriate international sports federation. The Scottish Sports Council will continue to advise governing bodies on drug testing procedures, and I am sure that the governing bodies are fully aware of the importance of measures to detect and prevent the use of drugs.

Mr. Canavan: As the recent incident involving the use of drugs in Argentina brought Scottish football into even more disrepute than the team's pathetic performance on the field, does my hon. Friend agree that it is now up to the Scottish Football Association and other appropriate authorities in Scotland to try to rescue Scotland's good name by insisting on the highest standards, including strict regulations and, if necessary, the use of spot checks to enforce those regulations?

Mr. McElhone: I agree with much of what my hon. Friend said. Indeed, FIFA—the international organisation for football—has asked the Football Association and the SFA to conduct inquiries into drug taking in football. I hope that governing bodies will take firm action and ensure that persons caught taking drugs are dealt with severely. It is important not only for the good name of Scotland but in terms of setting an example to the many young people who idolise football stars.

Mr. Dewar: Does my hon. Friend accept that sometimes brave words are spoken by the football authorities but action is remarkably sparse thereafter? Will he check in the near future to ensure that action is being taken and that Scotland's football house has been put in order? Will he also bear in mind that the Scottish Highland Games circuit, for example, manages checks on drug taking? Surely it is not beyond the resources of the Scottish Football Association to clear its name and to establish proper controls very quickly.

Mr. McElhone: Again, I agree with my hon. Friend. I hope that testing will take place in the near future for the good name of football and all other sports. Through the working party on football crowd behaviour and other experiments aimed at helping young people, I have had the fullest support from the SPA and the football clubs. I have no reason


to think otherwise than that they will give full support to this proposal.

Mr. Fairbairn: Does the Minister agree that if the hon. Member for West Stirlingshire (Mr. Canavan) took a perpetual sleeping draught none of us would want that to be objected to?

Mr. McElhone: No. The loss of my hon. Friend the Member for West Stirlingshire (Mr. Canavan) would make the House a very dull place indeed.

Mr. Buchan: Will the Minister tell us whether there is any truth in the rumour that stimulants were used by the journalists and tranquillisers by the players?

Mr. McElhone: I think that there is a great deal of stimulus here today. The only good thing that came out of the whole exercise was that my right hon. Friend went to see Scotland play Holland. I think that his magnetic influence on the players brought about the good result. We are all sorry that he did not go to the first two games.

Mr. Monro: Is the Minister aware that I agree with his responsible attitude to this matter? Over and above that, does he agree that we should ensure that the reputation of Scotland's sportsmen and sportswomen is absolutely free from any hint of drug taking in future? Will he bring to the notice of the Scottish Sports Council and the governing bodies in sport the recent work published by Canada subsequent to the Olympic Games, covering this matter in great detail, and the work now under preparation by the Sports Council in London?

Mr. McElhone: I certainly undertake to do that. The British Sports Council, which has supported research into detection methods, recently announced the spending of £75,000 over three years to help deal with this matter. Action is being taken, but I realise that there is some urgency about it to get back the good name of football.

Teaching Appointments

Mr. Dempsey: asked the Secretary of State for Scotland, in view of the employment restrictions placed on students leaving colleges under the special temporary employment programme, if he will relax the provisions of circular 819 in order to create more teaching

appointments; and if he will make a statement.

Mr. Millan: Provision has already been made in the rate support grant settlement for 1978–79 for the employment of more teachers than are required to meet the staffing standards recommended in circular 819 and the Red Book. Additional posts have also been made available under the schemes for the creation of extra teaching posts in urban areas of deprivation and for the secondment of teachers in special schools to take further training.

Mr. Dempsey: Is my right hon. Friend aware that competent education opinion in Scotland has publicly stated that were the curbs on staffing levels in schools to be removed it would lead to considerable employment opportunities? Has he noticed that, among a number of suggestions which have been made, a reduction in the size of composite classes to 25 and a general reduction in primary classes from 33 to 30 per class would result in many students being employed in the profession for which they have been educated and trained?

Mr. Millan: The figures quoted by my hon. Friend might be a little misleading. For example, in September 1977 the pupil-teacher ratio in the primary sector was 22·4. Therefore, the figures are comparatively favourable. We are already providing for something above that standard. I am not sure that I can go any further at the moment. I am very much aware of the problem that we shall have this year with the output from the colleges, as I anticipated that we would. I have been getting the intake figures reduced to eliminate this problem as soon as possible.

Mrs. Bain: When he is studying the implications of the special temporary employment programme for youngsters leaving Scottish colleges of education, will the Secretary of State pay particular attention to applications from local authorities for the establishment of nursery classes in schools where classrooms have been closed? Teachers may then be employed to establish these nursery classes, to meet the high demand, particularly in the West of Scotland, for preschool facilities.

Mr. Millan: I am not aware that my Department is holding back nursery class


provision. I shall certainly check on that. The fact is that the authorities, for reasons of their own—financial stringency and the rest—have not been enthusiastic about expanding this sector of education as rapidly as some people would like, but if one compares the situation with what it was three or four years ago one sees that there has been a substantial expansion. As school accommodation not otherwise needed becomes available, the opportunities for further expansion will arise.

Dr. Bray: Is my right hon. Friend aware that the widening of tasks for which teachers can be recruited is welcome, but that there is scope for going a great deal further in this direction? The in-service training of teachers could be extended to special schools and secondary education generally. Is my hon. Friend aware that there is a very serious need for the extension of remedial education?

Mr. Millan: With special schools one runs into the factor of securing basic qualifications. There has been a tremendous expansion of in-service training in secondary education generally over the last few years. My proposals for the colleges of education assume a continuing growth in in-service training. We are therefore already providing a tremendous amount of such training.

Rating Levels

Lord James Douglas-Hamilton: asked the Secretary of State for Scotland to what extent the difference between the rate increase in the Lothian Region of 16·8 per cent. and the decrease in Strathclyde of 0·1 per cent. is attributable to the varying levels of rate support grant awarded to each authority.

Mr. Millan: Rate poundages are determined by each local authority in the light of its expenditure proposals as well as grant entitlement and other factors. The effects of grant variations on rate levels cannot be isolated.

Lord James Douglas-Hamilton: Is the right hon. Gentleman aware that the level of rate support grant for the Lothian Regional Council has decreased by at least 1 per cent. this year while that for the Strathclyde Regional Council has increased by at least 1 per cent.? Is he aware that if this trend continues it will

be virtually impossible for the Lothian Regional Council to build the outer city bypass with maximum speed and efficiency? Is the right hon. Gentleman further aware that this project is supported by every political party on the regional council?

Mr. Millan: I do not think that I can accept the latter part of the hon. Gentleman's question. He is referring to the results of revaluation. It is well known that Lothian's increase in rateable value was greater than the Scottish average, whereas in Strathclyde it was less than the Scottish average. That inevitably works its way through the resources element of rate support grant. The basis of these calculations is agreed with COSLA.

Fishing Industry

Mr. Sproat: asked the Secretary of State for Scotland if he will make a statement on the latest situation in the fishing industry.

Mr. Milan: My right hon. Friend the Minister of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food will be making a statement to the House later this week on the Council of Ministers' meeting which he and I attended in Luxembourg yesterday and which is still in progress.

Mr. Sproat: Does the right hon. Gentleman realise that hon. Members from all parts of the House strongly support the fight which his right hon. Friend is making on behalf of justice for the British fishing industry? Does he also realise that it would be far more welcome to the House and the industry as a whole to have no agreement now rather than a bad agreement now, and that if no agreement is reached we look forward to the Minister coming to the House and announcing a comprehensive package of non-discriminatory conservation measures to apply in British waters as soon as possible?

Mr. Millan: No agreement was reached yesterday about the internal regime. I was present at the meeting. Today's agenda relates to a number of important detailed matters, including conservation. We must wait to see what comes out of today's meeting, but we have already said that in the absence of Community conservation measures we feel free and intend


to introduce further national conservation measures.

Mr. Grimond: Is the Minister aware that the whole House will congratulate the Government on the stand they are taking on fishing? Will he confirm that they have no intention of recognising the so-called agreement which was said to have been made in Berlin in our absence?

Mr. Milan: There is no question of our recognising that so-called agreement. It is impossible to have an agreement without our participation, and informal understandings are not recognised by us.

Mr. Robert Hughes: Is my right hon. Friend aware that Scottish fishermen's leaders—namely, Gilbert Buchan and Willie Hay—last night said how much they apreciate the work done by my right hon. Friend and the Minister of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food? Is he further aware that they believe—this view is widely shared, and I share it myself—that we may have to go further than nondiscriminatory unilateral measures if we are to save certain parts of the Scottish fishing fleet, especially that engaged in herring fishing?

Mr. Millan: I know the views of the industry on conservaion because I met the two gentlemen mentioned and many others in Luxembourg yesterday. As I have said, we must await the outcome of today's meeting, where these matters are specifically under discussion. We have stated, however, that we have the right, which we intend to exercise, to introduce national conservation measures if we consider that to be necessary. Of course, there are a number of areas where we consider them necessary.

Mr. Watt: Does the Secretary of State recognise that there are now considerable shoals of herring to be found off the East Coast? As he imposes a ban on West Coast herring fishing, will he allow a gradual lifting of the ban on East Coast herring fishing so that the factories round the Scottish coast may have some supplies to keep their doors open?

Mr. Millan: I do not think I can promise that because the scientific evidence, which is accepted by the industry, confirms that we should continue with the North Sea ban at least until the end of this year. It would be foolish to attempt

to negotiate minor quotas for different parts of Scotland. For example, the Shetlanders have asked me for that. Such quotas would be the thin end of a very large wedge and would be detrimental to Scottish fishermen.

Mr. Buchanan-Smith: Is the right hon. Gentleman aware that off the West Coast the haddock quota of 9,000 tons is nearly exhausted and that there is therefore liable to be a diversion of effort to the North Sea for the rest of the year? Will the right hon. Gentleman give an assurance that the Government have in mind measures to cope with that increased concentration of effort in the North Sea?

Mr. Milan: We are already talking to the industry about that problem. There was a meeting last week. Something will have to be done if we are not to fish out the year's quota long before the end of the year. Both sides recognise the problem, but, as the hon. Gentleman will know, solutions are not very easy.

Mr. Sillars: Does not the Secretary of State agree that the worst service we could do to the fishing industry would be to repeat the performance of the Conservative Government which negotiated entry—that is, to pretend that any national fishing agreement reached now would provide a long-term safeguard for the industry? Is it not the case that, although we can employ national discrimination now, in 1982 the superiority of the Community legislation will be the overriding factor?

Mr. Milan: Unless, as I hope, we are able to negotiate something better, by 1982 the rest of the Community will literally be able to fish up to our beaches without national restrictions. That was the mistake of the Conservative Government, but I have no intention of compounding that mistake by agreeing to an internal regime settlement which is unsatisfactory for the United Kingdom generally and for Scotland in particular.

Mr. Donald Stewart: Will the right hon. Gentleman give an undertaking that if the suggested ban on West Coast herring fishing is eventually imposed he will use his influence to secure exemption for the one or two vessels that confine themselves to drift-net fishing?

Mr. Milan: I shall certainly look at that problem, which arose last year as


well. There were difficulties even then about getting these very limited exceptions to the rule. I do not want to say any more at this moment because the discussions are literally going on today, and I should like to know what has happened at them. However, we have an interest in excluding, for example, the Clyde fishery, which is a significant local fishery, from any ban on the West Coast. We have been talking about that in Luxembourg today. I should like to consider what the right hon. Gentleman has said when we see what happens today.

Mr. Teddy Taylor: Is it not rather silly of the Secretary of State, in his last reply, to destroy the unanimity in the House about the importance of arriving at a satisfactory agreement, particularly bearing in mind that if he wishes to talk about the regional negotiations there are many people who wonder why on earth a Labour Government failed apparently even to attempt to resolve the matter in the alleged renegotiation in Dublin? Does the Secretary of State agree that the important thing is to arrive at a satisfactory permanent solution? As long as the Government go along these lines, they will get full backing from the House.
On a particular point, can the Secretary of State give us any guidance as to what will be the position of Scottish vessels fishing off Norway and the Faroes when the agreements between the EEC and Norway and the Farces terminate quite shortly?

Mr. Milian: Again, these are matters which are literally being discussed today. I would expect, however, that if there is no more substantive agreement there will at least be some kind of roll-over arrangement. But I honestly cannot answer that particular point today. On the first point, we are grateful for the Opposition's support of the Government's efforts. I do not know whether it arises from a guilty conscience, but we are grateful for their support.

Tourism (Continental Ferry Connections)

Mr. Gordon Wilson: asked the Secretary of State for Scotland what studies have been made of the advantages to the Scottish tourist industry of a roll-on/roll-

off ferry connection with the Continent of Europe.

Mr. Gregor MacKenzie: The contribution of a direct ferry connection between Scotland and Northern Europe to the development of tourism is not in question. The Scottish Tourist Board is assessing the market for such a service with a view to persuading possible operators of its potential viability.

Mr. Wilson: Will the right hon. Gentleman accept that I find that answer reasonably assuring, but will he also note that the nearest access point to Scotland for seagoing passenger traffic is Newcastle, and that that traffic has built up in recent years? Will he consider the possibility of helping to steer that access to Dundee, because it would be a tremendous boost to the port and city of Dundee if he were able to do so?

Mr. MacKenzie: I should be very glad, and so would the Scottish Tourist Board, to see a regular ferry service between Scotland and a port in Northern Europe, but the Government do not have power to steer that. However, I assure the hon. Gentleman and others who are interested in this aspect of affairs that the Scottish Tourist Board has been making considerable efforts to persuade the ferry companies involved to consider ports in Scotland and, indeed, to ask major liner companies also to consider ports in Scotland, and that will continue.

Mr. Welsh: Does the Minister agree that such a roll-on/roll-off ferry would be of great assistance to local industry and could help to create jobs in an area of very high unemployment?

Mr. MacKenzie: I am conscious of the problems of Dundee, as is my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State for Scotland, but I am bound to tell the hon. Gentleman that there are other ports in Scotland which would have a claim, and I am sure he would agree that they should all be considered.

EX-POLICE SERGEANT WILLIAM JAMIESON

Mr. Dalyell: asked the Lord Advocate why he has offered the hon. Member for West Lothian a sight of the Crown Agent's report on the case of ex-Sergeant


William Jamieson of Bo'ness Police, conditional on confidentiality; whether he will allow the report to be seen by Sergeant Jamieson, Sergeant Jamieson's lawyers, and the lawyers of the Police Federation; and whether he is satisfied that a Crown Agent's conditional inquiry is a satisfactory method of dealing with the circumstances of such a case.

The Lord Advocate (Mr. Ronald King Murray): The Crown Agent's report proceeded upon the statements of witnesses given in confidence. Accordingly, the report must remain confidential and it would not be appropriate to show it to any interested party. However, it seemed to me to be reasonable that my hon. Friend should have an opportunity to see in confidence the results of an inquiry affecting persons most of whom are his constituents.

Mr. Dalyell: May I acknowledge the hard work that the Lord Advocate has given to the Jamieson case and, indeed, to so many other cases, and take the opportunity to regret his decision not to seek re-election in Leith? Does he recognise that his offer puts a non-lawyer Member of Parliament into a dilemma? Should I be satisfied, having seen it, though my qualifications to pass such judgment are somewhat limited? Should I not be satisfied, I can do nothing without shattering confidence and breaching faith. Frankly, does this not once again emphasise the urgent need to look closely at the whole stated case procedure in such instances?

The Lord Advocate: I thank my hon. Friend for his kind remarks. I am afraid, Mr. Speaker, that you may see me at the Dispatch Box for more than another year yet.
Concerning my hon. Friend's remarks, certainly we are looking at the stated case procedure. This must be looked at in a broader context than any one hard case.
In regard to the opportunity that I gave to my hon. Friend, which still stands, I realise that it is a difficult matter for him because he has a conflict of interests, perhaps, in his own mind. However, I offered my hon. Friend the opportunity on the basis that he is a trustee for all of his constituents rather than an advocate of the interests of a single

constituent. I hope that my hon. Friend will resolve the conflict, because it seems a pity that he has not yet availed himself of this opportunity.

SOUTH AFRICAN IMMIGRATION ORGANISATION (PTY) LTD.

Mr. Canavan: asked the Lord Advocate whether, pursuant to his reply to the hon. Member for West Stirling-shire on 17th May, he is now able to make a statement about his investigation into the South African Immigration Organisation (Pty) Ltd., Glasgow.

The Lord Advocate: The South African Immigration Organisation (Pty) Ltd. has intimated to the Department of Employment that it ceased to carry on business in the United Kingdom on 31st May 1978.

Mr. Canavan: Is it not a bit of a coincidence that this illegal racialist organisation should suddenly do a moonlight flit after I raised on the Floor of the House of Commons the possibility of prosecution? If at some future date sufficient evidence crops up, will my right hon. and learned Friend prosecute the organisation for breaking the law with the same efficiency as the South African authorities would prosecute it if it broke the law in its own rotten country?

The Lord Advocate: It would be wrong for me to comment on the earlier part of my hon. Friend's remarks. However, I can tell him that the Department of Employment had not made available to me facts upon which a prosecution could be brought before this organisation intimated its cessation of business. If facts are presented to me showing that an offence has been committed, I shall examine them with a view to prosecution.

Mr. Teddy Taylor: We in the House know that we should not take seriously the hon. Member for West Stirlingshire (Mr. Canavan), but does not the right hon. and learned Gentleman think that it would be right to say that on the basis of information available to him no prosecution was in fact taken?

The Lord Advocate: It is certainly the case that no prosecution was taken in this case.

GLASGOW SHERIFF COURT

Mr. Teddy Taylor: asked the Lord Advocate when he next intends to visit the Glasgow Sheriff Court.

The Lord Advocate: I hope to visit Glasgow Sheriff Court in the near future.

Mr. Taylor: I am grateful for the interest that the Lord Advocate is taking in the position of the Glasgow Sheriff Court, but dues he agree that one of the most unsatisfactory aspects of the present difficult situation is the housing of witnesses for both defence and prosecution in one room, particularly in cases involving violence'? Will he be prepared to look at this point? I appreciate the steps that he is taking to improve the position for the longer term, but will he look at matters such as this in the short term?

The Lord Advocate: I am happy to respond to that. The hon. Member has raised an important issue. I have endeavoured to see that witnesses for the Crown and for the defence are accommodated in separate rooms, particularly since the hon. Gentleman raised the point on a previous occasion.
Shortage of accommodation has made this difficult in the past in certain cases. There has been some improvement in the accommodation arrangements. I hope to inspect the up-to-date position for myself when I visit Glasgow Sheriff Court soon.

Mr. Henderson: When the Lord Advocate visits Glasgow Sheriff Court, will he ask for the views of those there on the success of the policies advocated by the hon. Member for Glasgow, Cathcart (Mr. Taylor) in Saudi Arabia?

The Lord Advocate: I shall certainly put that question. I doubt whether I shall get an answer.

Mr. Buchanan: Will my right hon. and learned Friend say what efforts are being made to cut down the backlog of cases at the sheriff court? One of the great disadvantages of the present overcrowding in the sheriff court is the ever-increasing backlog of cases. What success is my right hon. and learned Friend having in cutting that down?

The Lord Advocate: On the last occasion I was able to tell the House that the setting up of two additional

courts for sheriff and jury cases had started to make some impact. I can now tell the House that at the end of last month the backlog of sheriff and jury cases in Glasgow—that is, cases awaiting preparation—amounted to 248. This compares with 275 cases at the end of the previous month. That is a modest improvement, but none the less it is an improvement—of about 10 per cent.—and I think that it is significant.

Mr. Galbraith: When the Lord Advocate visits Glasgow Sheriff Court, will he also visit the proposed site of the new sheriff court, and then consider whether it is really wise to move the sheriff court to the south side of the river when most of the legal offices are on the north side?

The Lord Advocate: I shall certainly be glad to visit the site of the new sheriff court. However, the shortage of accommodation has been such an acute difficulty for the administration of justice that I think that any chopping and changing on merely geographical grounds would really be quite inappropriate.

Mr. Fairbairn: When the Lord Adovcate next visits Glasgow Sheriff Court, knowing the sensitivity that exists between the Glasgow Bar Association and the profession in Edinburgh, will he take the opportunity to correct the statement in The Scotsman newspaper announcing his regretted resignation, or his intention not to stand again, and saying that there were no vacancies at present on the Court of Session bench? Will he say that there is one of his own creation, and that when the General Election comes he will not recommend to the Secretary of State, or accept a recommendation from the Secretary of State, that he should fill it?

The Lord Advocate: I think that I know what the hon. and learned Gentleman means, but he has chosen a very long way to put it. I am not sure that I can answer him.

PRECOGNITION OFFICERS

Lord James Douglas-Hamilton: asked the Lord Advocate what arrangements he is making for the employment of more persons to take precognitions in order to assist the procurator-fiscal service.

The Lord Advocate: The Civil Service Department has approved the appointment of 13 additional legal staff and seven additional precognition officers.

Lord James Douglas-Hamilton: Is the right hon. and learned Gentleman aware that nothing is more depressing for procurators-fiscal in Glasgow and elsewhere in Scotland than to be overloaded with paperwork when they have to appear all day in court? Will he do everything within his power to make certain that they have the necessary back-up to support, so that they can perform their tasks with maximum efficiency and speed?

The Lord Advocate: I am glad that the hon. Gentleman has stressed the importance of back-up support. The increase of 20 in the staff, which has been authorised by the Civil Service Department, includes deputy fiscals as well as precognition officers. I am happy to say that of the total of 20, six will be allocated to Glasgow.
However, in allocating additional staff one has to bear in mind the need for back-up. As the hon. Gentleman has rightly pointed out, it is not enough to have highly qualified legal personnel to do the work in court. One has to back them up with shorthand-typists and other people who can give them the necessary material when it is needed to go into court.

PRESCRIBED DRUGS (REGULATION OF PROMOTION)

3.31 p.m.

Mr. Mike Thomas: I beg to move,
That leave be given to bring in a Bill to regulate the promotion and advertisement of prescribed drugs; to remove prescription charges in respect of certain classes of prescribed drugs; and for purposes connected therewith.
I am grateful to my right hon. Friend the Minister of State for taking the trouble to be with us today.
My Bill proposes to do two things: first, to abolish prescription charges on a wide range of drugs, which, as many right hon. and hon. Members know, is an important component of Labour Party policy; secondly, to put an end to bogus trials of drugs, in which both general practitioners and patients are

misled as to the real purposes of the drug companies in advocating the trials.
I want to make it clear at the outset that I have no prejudice against the pharmaceutical industry. I believe that the benefits of a vigorous, inventive and productive pharmaceutical industry to the National Health Service and to the economy as a whole are clear, and I have no wish to damage that industry.
However, there are two marketing practices in which the industry is now engaging in which the State should take a hand and which Parliament should take powers to control. They are, first, an old practice, that of branding drugs, which frankly has no merit for the patient, no merit for the doctor and no merit for the NHS. Its only merit is one for the drug companies, in that it enables them to promote the sales of their drugs after the patent life has been used up. They promote sales to doctors through branding in much the same way as soap powder manufacturers seek to promote the sales of their own products to the consumer.
The other practice that I wish to regulate is a new one and is in some ways much more sinister. It is the practice of bogus clinical trials, in which large numbers of patients are induced, through their doctors, to transfer to a drug, not because they may get any benefit from so doing, not because doctors, the medical profession or academia at large will learn anything from the rudimentary study that is made of the transfer of the patient to that drug, but simply because it will promote the drug company's market share in sales of that preparation. I regard those trials, which have been widely criticised in the Press and elsewhere, as reprehensible, and I hope to say a little more about that as I make my speech.
First, I turn to the question of branding. As I said, it is designed for one purpose only and that is to prolong the sales life of a product, and it leads to almost all the bad practices in which drug companies indulge. It is branding that leads to extensive advertising and to representatives expensively calling upon doctors and bothering and cajoling them about the use of their company's drugs.
I do not object to the drug companies, in common with others, being given the protection of the patent laws. Indeed,


in this Parliament we propose—I am not sure whether the Bill has become law yet—to extend patent life from 16 to 20 years, and that will give companies substantial benefits which may well be deserved. But to prolong the benefit beyond the patent life by having got the doctor indoctrinated into using a brand name rather than the chemical, the generic or the official name in the pharmacopoeia is in my view, a quite unjustified practice.
I should make clear that it is also a practice that results in great cost to the National Health Service. For example —if I may just give one—the drug tetracycline is available in dozens of varieties, all chemically identical, and those who say that I am advocating that patients should be given an inferior or different drug are wrong, because the Pharmacopoeia Commission lays down that drugs must be formulated in an identical way for them to be able to take the chemical name. As I have said, there are dozens of varieties of tetracycline and some, while several times more expensive than others, in their effect on the patient are identical.
There is a simple way to stop that, and I propose it in my Bill. I have to say that it is not my own idea but the idea of a magazine published by the Consumers Association, entitled the Drug and Therapeutics Bulletin. It says, and I believe it to be right, that a practical means of dealing with this problem would be to mark on all prescription forms "Please dispense non-proprietary equivalent", which the doctor could cross out or leave. That would be at the bottom of every prescription form, and if the doctor did not delete those words, thereby leaving the chemist free to dispense the cheapest drug of that kind, I propose in my Bill that no prescription charge would be made.
The purpose of that is to provide a small incentive to doctors and to patients to give some thought to the massive drug bill which they impose on the NHS, which now extends to £400 million or £500 million. To those who say that that could not work, I say that it is already working, and that it works for large numbers of my constituents, because in all of the hospitals of the Newcastle Area Health Authority that is already the case. No matter what the doctor writes on the pres-

cription form in hospital, the patient is dispensed the cheapest equivalent.
Let me give just one example. If the doctor writes "aldomet", which is the Merck, Sharpe and Dohme variety of the drug methyldopa, the patient is given methyldopa in the cheapest form that is available. There is no question of that being inferior or different. It is the same drug and the only difference is a saving to the NHS. On a slightly different basis, in Australia, New Zealand and a number of other countries precisely that arrangement is pursued with general practitioners.
I want to put in one reserve caveat because I am well aware of the remuneration problem of retail pharmacists. The formula for rewarding chemists would need to be adjusted so that they did not suffer because of the lower turnover that would result from the cheapest drugs being prescribed. I also propose that as well as getting a formula to make sure that their rewards stayed broadly the same they would get a more interesting job, for the simple reason that they would be relieved of the boring process of taking a drug from a shelf and putting it in a bottle. They would have to give some thought to which brand of the drug was to be provided in response to the prescription. They would not, of course, decide which type of drug; that would he decided by the doctor.
I come now to the question of bogus clinical trials. These are reprehensible in the extreme. There is an increasing public and professional concern about them, and it has been expressed by clinical pharmacologists, by the Drug and Therapeutics Bulletin and by a number of other people, including the British Pharmacological Society.
The basis on which the trials are operated is as follows. A pseudo trial is designed by a pharmaceutical company, often by its marketing division with little or no guidance from its medical department. The trial protocols, the rules by which it is run, usually have characteristic features. They generally aim to recruit enormous numbers of patients. A total of 20,000 to 30,000 is common, and one study hoped to recruit 100,000.
Either the drug has been introduced recently and is competing with a lot of other drugs designed for the same purpose, or sometimes it is a drug whose patent life is about to run out and the


company hopes to get the patient transferred to a drug which still has a long patent life. The disease being treated is frequently one where drugs may have to be taken for a considerable period of time.
The methods for assessing the benefits of the trial are usually crude, the duration of observation is minimal, and the methods for recognising adverse drug reactions are very much over-simplified. Usually, the doctors concerned are provided with some small pecuniary reward, although it must be made clear that in my view in the vast majority of cases general practitioners are well motivated in participating in these trials and often are misled by the drug companies concerned as to their value.
The trial is analysed by the company's own personnel. The results are published in some obscure scientific or pseudoscientific journal in which often the rule of economy is reversed. The contributors are not paid. The drug companies which wish to have articles placed in the journals actually pay the journals. According to The Sunday Times earlier this year, as much as £85 per page is paid by the drug companies to get the results written up.
The real aims of the trials are threefold. They make sure that large numbers of patients go on to the drugs, and the sponsoring companies hope that they will stay on the drugs after the trials have ended. They are a means of drawing attention—

Mr. Speaker: Order. The hon. Member will come to a conclusion, will he not? He has had a Welsh 10 minutes already.

Mr. Thomas: Forgive me, Mr. Speaker. As I began my speech, I noticed the time. It was 3.32 precisely. I have still a minute to go.

Mr. Speaker: No. It was 3.31 when the hon. Member began.

Mr. Thomas: I shall get my spectacles adjusted, perhaps by consulting your optician Mr. Speaker.
I shall bring my remarks to a rapid conclusion. The purpose of the trials is as I have described them. No British-based research company indulges in these trials. They are indulged in entirely by multinationals.
In conclusion, I quote from the evidence by the British Pharmacological Society to the Royal Commission on the National Health Service, which spells out the matter very clearly. It said:
Most of these studies are at best useless from a scientific point of view, and at worst they amount to little more than buying of prescriptions.
I believe that by involving the Medicines Commission and the ethical committee of the area health authority concerned, which my Bill proposes, we could control these trials.
The object of my Bill is very simple. It will not affect research. It will not affect exports. It will not affect the freedom of doctors to prescribe what they wish. However, it will abolish charges on most prescriptions at no cost to the National Health Service. It will stop wasteful expenditure on promotion. It will make the best use of doctors' and chemists' talents.

Question put and agreed to.

Bill ordered to be brought in by Mr. Mike Thomas, Mr. Laurie Pavitt, Mr. Jack Ashley, Miss Betty Boothroyd and Mr. John Cartwright.

PRESCRIBED DRUGS (REGULATION OF PROMOTION)

Mr. Mike Thomas accordingly presented a Bill to regulate the promotion and advertisement of prescribed drugs; to remove prescription charges in respect of certain classes of prescribed dugs; and for purposes connected therewith: And the same was read the First time; and ordered to be read a Second time tomorrow and to be printed. [Bill 151.]

Orders of the Day — SUPPLY

[23RD ALLOTTED DAY]—considered

HOUSING

Motion made, and Question proposed, That this House do now adjourn.—[Mr. Tinn.]

Mr. Speaker: Before the debate begins, may I tell the House that there are more than 30 right hon. and hon. Members who have already indicated to me that they wish to participate? I make a very sincere and earnest appeal to right hon. and hon. Members who are called to exercise self-discipline and to remember that I also have a memory for those who do not co-operate.

3.44 p.m.

Mr. Michael Heseltine: It is of obvious importance that we should come back again to the subject of housing on this Adjournment motion, for it it at the centre of the social preoccupation with politics.
Every time that we have debated housing in recent months, we have done so against a deteriorating set of statistics in one way or another, and every time Ministers have sought to explain that there will be an improvement if only we give them a little longer for their policies to work their way through.
But as this Government have now had some four years in which their policies have had time to work through, it is important for us to start at the beginning and to remember that they came to office committed to reversing what they called the serious fall in the housing programme under the previous Conservative Government.
The fact is that there is a glaring distinction between what this Government have achieved and what they implied in their manifestos. Their best year in private sector housing completions is not even as good as the worst year under the last Conservative Government. The overall position of housing under this Government shows a very similar pattern. Last year. in 1977, fewer houses were

started than in any Conservative year, including the difficult year of 1973. Last year, completions under this Government exceeded only the worst year under the last Conservative Administration.
Taking the average results of the four years of the last Conservative Government and the four years of this Government in each year this Government have on average seen the completion of 40,000 fewer houses than was achieved under the last Conservative Administration. Far from reversing what they described as the serious fall, the Government have made that serious fall a permanent feature of housing policy.
The housing industry, which was suffering, as all other industries were suffering, from a temporary relapse as a result of the oil crisis, has now turned into a permanent cripple.
Within that continuing and persistent decline, the Labour Government have sought to switch the emphasis of house building away from the private sector, which is in practice what the overwhelming majority of people wish to encourage, in favour of local authority housing. We have now reached the stage where the cost of subsidising local authority housing is so heavy that it has forced the Government to adopt economies in other areas of the housing programme where better value for money unquestionably could have been obtained and also in areas where the real hardship and difficulty is to be found. I am, of course, thinking of the older and unmodernised housing.
Let me give one example. In order to help finance the increased council house programme, improvement grants have fallen from 361 in 1973 to only 113 in 1977. In other words, as part of the price of getting the public sector housing programme up by some 30,000, 250,000 houses in a year go unmodernised.
No one could seriously reckon that that was an economic or a social tradeoff which a responsible Government should pursue.

Mr. Frank Allaun: Is it not a fact that although Labour supports both owner-occupation and council housing, most Conservative Members of Parliament are the enemies of council tenants? If the hon. Member denies that, will he give the House an undertaking that a Conservative Government would


not cut council house building and subsidies? I ask that question because, on a previous occasion, the hon. Member avoided giving the answer. We want an answer to that question.

Mr. Heseltine: I am sure that the hon. Member will understand that the level of housing support has been cut very significantly under this Government in every direction. Therefore, for me to suggest that it will be possible for a Conservative Government automatically to reverse that trend on coming to power is irresponsible, and I am not prepared to do it.
However, the policies which we shall pursue for council tenants are incomparably more generous and realistic than anything that the present Government have on offer. I shall come back to this very important aspect of policy later in my speech.
In housing, we have found that in order to pursue the most expensive and, I argue, the most doctrinal aspects of housing policy, the Labour Government have been prepared to witness an overriding decline in the level of housing provision. In other words, the easy promises of the General Election have produced, as so often under Socialist administrations, dramatically worse results than the previous Conservative Government were achieving.

Mr. John Ovenden: Will the hon. Member give way?

Mr. Heseltine: I must obey Mr. Speaker's ruling. I am normally very generous in giving way but, as Mr. Speaker said, there are more than 30 right hon. and hon. Members who wish to contribute to the debate.
I want to look at the Government's policies as they are reflected in both the demand for housing and, on the other side of the coin, the construction industry's ability to provide houses. On both counts, the Government's policies have undoubtedly contributed to the wider problems of the home construction industry. The demand for housing, like the demand for everything else, obviously is a reflection of people's ability to pay. As the real take-home pay of the average industrial worker is 3 per cent. lower than it was in 1973–74, it inevitably follows that the building industry and the

demand for new homes have suffered along with all other investment areas.
Until there is a significant return to a rising real standard of living, it is cloud-cuckoo land to pretend that the home construction industry will be singled out for preferment and will see an upsurge in consistent demand for its products. The reality is that the moment there is any significant improvement in demand, as there was in the first quarter of this year, because the house-building programme in recent years has been so much lower than in previous years, there is a rapid increase in prices of the sort which created such panic in the Secretary of State's mind only a few weeks ago.
The Conservatives got houses built on an increasing scale incomparably better. Far more people bought their new homes under the last Conservative Government than this Government have achieved by their administration. That is the fundamental justification for what went on.

Mr. Eric S. Heifer: Prices?

Mr. Heseltine: The prices relate to the incomes. The critical question is the level of real take-home pay. For the hon. Member for Liverpool, Walton (Mr. Heifer) to barrack me when he has sat behind the Government, of which he was once a member, who have presided over a consistent decline in the standard of living of the British working people is an affront if ever there was one. Let us agree upon one thing that is certain. Until there is a genuine improvement in the real standard of living of the British people, the demand for new homes will remain at a relatively sluggish level.
The Secretary of State of course faces the inevitable dilemma of the inadequate building programmes under his responsibility, for he saw that instant reaction in rising prices very dramatically the moment there appeared to be an increase in people's disposable income. He took the short-term expedient of choking off the supply of building society money by rationing mortgages. I would not deny that this is bound to have an effect in keeping prices under control in the short term. But equally, of course, it has the long-term effect of diminishing the construction industry's confidence in building new homes, and therefore one has a vicious circle of decline.
Until there is an adjustment of house prices, there will not be an increase in the number of houses coming on to construction stream. In practice, of course, the right hon. Gentleman need not have bothered to take the action he took to ration the level of mortgage provision, for it became apparent within a few weeks of that panic action that the Government's so-called recovery, so short lived, was already at an end, and the increase in the level of money supply and today's figures indicating the level of inflationary wage increases show that the economic strategy will have to be corrected in the relatively near future, which in itself will choke off any increase in houses prices anyway.
The Secretary of State's technique in bringing house prices under control has had the effect of once again reducing the demand for houses but has also in the short term caused an increase in their price levels dramatically faster than the rate at which real take-home pay was rising.
Not only has the Government's overall economic policy gravely weakened the housing situation, as all statistics indicate, but the detailed specific decisions taken by the Secretary of State within the environs of his own Department have consistently added to the problems created by the overall economic situation.
First, the Community Land Act is recognised widely as a major deterrent to the provision of land for new housing and to the confidence of the industry. It is without question the most oversold feature of the Government's housing programme. In its first year of operation, 32 acres of land were released. In the second year, between 350 and 400 acres were released. I calculate that, at 10 houses to the acre, that would enable in two years an additional 3,000 houses to be built when the overall housing construction programme for the country in that period was about 600,000. To suggest that the Community Land Act had anything other than an irritant effect in the provision of new houses is not borne out by the statistics.
I was surprised that the Government have become so concerned at the charges being made against the Act that only on 19th June they issued a circular claiming that Liverpool is to get 1,000 more homes thanks to the Act. If one reads

behind the sensationalised healdines produced by the Department, one discovers that 87 acres of disused British Rail land have been rescued from dereliction and transferred to the local authority. Because that is claimed to have been done by the Community Land Act, it is claimed as a triumph for the Act.
But the fact is that there was nothing to stop the transfer of the land from British Rail to the local authority long before the Act was a gleam in a Socialist eye. What it proves is not that the Act is necessary but that my hon. Friend the Member for Hornsey (Mr. Rossi) has been consistently right in pointing out that there is far too much land in the city centres in the ownership of local authorities and nationalised industries, that too little of it is being released, that too little is known of the scale of the ownership, that the process of developing it should and could have been dramatically speeded up, and that that did not need the Community Land Act from beginning to end.

Mr. Heifer: This piece of land is in my constituency. Is the hon. Gentleman aware that for many years I conducted correspondence with the then Conservative local authority and British Rail urging them to come to an agreement about it? The local authority was dragging its feet, and eventually there had to be Government-supported intervention before the land was transferred.

Mr. Heseltine: As the hon. Gentleman knows, Liverpool has not been under Conservative control for many years. There has been nothing to stop a Labour Minister from intervening at any time since 1974, but it took until 1978. It is unrealistic to suggest that the Community Land Act was in any way necessary in that process. The Press release sent out by the Department is a deliberate attempt to try to give credit to the Act for a piece of administration by the Department and nothing more.

Mr. Heller: Why did not the local Tory authority do it?

Mr. Heseitine: The hon. Gentleman does not understand the situation. There have been four years during which the Tories were not responsible for the Liverpool authority at all. I am arguing that the Community Land Act was not in any way essential for the transfer of that land,


despite what the Press release suggests. What we have argued consistently is that what is needed is not the Community Land Act but a very much greater sense of realism and urgency about the need to release inner city land. I am delighted that the right hon. Gentleman should have used his good offices to get that land in Liverpool transferred, but it is a drop in the ocean compared with the land owned in the public sector, a great deal of which should be put on offer for development, particularly in the private sector.
The second feature of the Government's policies which undoubtedly is already aggravating the house-building industry and will make the position worse is the proposal to move the development land tax up to 80 per cent. The right hon. Gentleman is aware that the concern in the building industry over the provision of land is growing, and that the large-scale building companies believe that by 1980. unless there is a significant increase in the stream of land, it will adversely affect the industry's capacity to provide new houses. The Government should announce at once that they have no intention of moving up to that level of taxation and ensure that under the taxation of gains the rate of the tax is pitched at a level acceptable both to those who own the land and those who seek to buy it.
Thirdly, the Government will argue that their new legislation to provide loans and grants for house purchasers is a significant contribution to young people's ability to buy their own homes. It is worth checking the facts.
The Home Purchase Assistance and Housing Corporation Guarantee Bill to provide these incentives to young people was introduced last February. Five months later, the price of the average new house has risen by well over £1,000 since February—the period that it has taken to get the legislation through the parliamentary processes so far.
What would the Government scheme contribute to anyone now wanting to buy those homes? A maximum grant of £100 and a loan of £600. Therefore, the Government's incentive scheme, and the time it took to get it through the processes of the parliamentary system, actually leaves average purchasers hundreds of

pounds worse off at the end of the process than they were had they bought their home at the beginning of the process. The fact is that if someone manages to scramble together the resources to buy, it is almost certain that he will need to take out a substantial mortgage. Such a person will find that the average mortgage today costs about an extra £2 a week than is did a few weeks ago.
But, of course, mortgages always cost more under a Labour Government. If one takes the average level of mortgage interest rates under the whole of the four years of the previous Conservative Government and under the whole of the four years of this Government, one finds that approximately 2 per cent. extra is having to be found by everyone who has an average mortgage on a house.

The Minister for Housing and Construction (Mr. Reginald Freeson): The mortgage rate came down under this Government.

Mr. Heseltine: Mortgage rates have just started going up under this Government. I would be fascinated to hear the Secretary of State tell us whether he sees mortgage interest rates coming down in the near future.

The Under-Secretary of State for Trade (Mr. Clinton Davis): What were they in 1974?

Mr. Heseltine: I gave the figures for a four-year average and not during the period of the oil crisis.

Mr. Clinton Davis: Nonsense.

Mr. Heseltine: The averages are not nonsense. If the hon. Gentleman seriously intends to tell the people of this country that four years of Labour Government is worth an extra 2 per cent. on their mortgage interest rates, persistently year in and year out, I am afraid that he will find a very different response from the electorate. In other words, for every week in which this Government have been in power everyone who has an average mortgage has been paying an additional £2·50, simply for the extra cost of borrowing under a Labour Government.

Mr. Bruce Douglas-Mann: Will the hon. Gentleman tell the House what the mortgage rates


were at the time when the Conservatives came into office in 1970 and at the time when they left? To what level have they now come down?

Mr. Heseltine: The only thing of importance to someone paying off a mortgage, which is a long-term exercise, is the average cost of borrowing over any period of time. The important statistic is that for every week of this Labour Government £2·50 extra has been the cost of interest rates alone for every average mortgage holder.
The fourth decision for which this Government are responsible affects the future of the building industry itself. I am delighted that the hon. Member for Walton is present. If that industry did not have problems enough as a result of the Government's economic policies, in practice it now faces the uncertainties with regard to the State threat to nationalise companies within the industry.
I know that the House will be familiar with the campaign which is being launched by the construction industry under the name of CABIN, about which we have all seen Press coverage this week. I do not intend to argue the merits one way or another in this debate, because we can do that another time. What I do say to the Government is that if they think that they will get co-operation and enthusiasm from those responsible for the construction industry by allowing the impression to gain ground that nationalisation is always on the agenda, they have no concept whatever of the diversion of management time which is now being committed in order to persuade people in Britain that they should allow that industry to remain in the free enterprise sector.
The pattern is familiar. We have seen it happen in industry after industry, where the Labour Party is prepared to pursue its narrow doctrinal purpose regardless of the efficiency of the industry or the service which it can provide to the country at large. Regrettably, it has now moved on across the whole industrial spectrum to the construction industry and the material supplies industry.

Mr. Helier: Will the hon. Gentleman give way? [HON. MEMBERS "Not again."] The hon. Gentleman referred

to me and surely I am entitled to ask a question on that basis. Will the hon. Gentleman explain what he means by "nationalisation of the construction industry" in view of the fact that the document in front of him—"Building Britain's Future" produced by the Labour Party, and which I hope all hon. Members read rather than just take from the employers' Press—does not propose nationalisation? What it proposes is the setting up of a national construction company based upon two major companies. That initially means that one begins with two and from then onwards that company expands and develops, but not taking over other companies. Would not the hon. Gentleman agree that his view is the same as it was when we set up the National Enterprise Board? Time and again he repeated in this House and throughout the country that the Labour Government intended to nationalise 100 firms. That was a lie, and it is a lie to say that we intend to nationalise the construction industry.

Mr. Heseltine: What the hon. Gentleman does not understand is that if we are misrepresenting the nationalisation plans of the Labour Government, it is in the gift of Cabinet Ministers to deny that there is to be any nationalisation of any companies in the construction industry. If the Prime Minister, when asked whether these plans are realistic, accepts that nationalisation is always on the agenda of the Labour Party, then it is realistic that we in the Conservative Party who are opposed to it will never cease to draw the attention of the country to the dangers involved. If we are distorting the Labour Party's plans, then all I ask the Secretary of State to say is that he does not believe in the policy. I ask him to explain why the Prime Minister, or any of his colleagues, did not deny its value at the Labour Party conference which opposed it.
I would be most grateful to understand why an unidentified Cabinet Minister had to go off to Sir Maurice Laing in order to try to persuade him—of course, behind closed doors—to drop the campaign. Why has that been done now that we are running up to a General Election campaign, when traditionally the Labour Party understands that nationalisation as an issue is widely unpopular with the


public and will, therefore, do everything it can to suppress the contents?

Mr. Heffer: Will the hon. Gentleman give way?

Mr. Heseltine: No, I shall not give way.

Mr. Heller: That is a lie.

Mr. Speaker: Order. It is quite clear that the hon. Member for Henley (Mr. Heseltine) is not giving way.

Mr. Norman Tebbit: On a point of order, Mr. Speaker. I was tolerant last Thursday of the hon. Member for Liverpool, Walton (Mr. Heffer). He is using the expression "liar" of too many hon. Members of this House too frequently. I think that it is time that he was called to withdraw it or to leave the Chamber.

Mr. Speaker: Order. If the hon. Member for Liverpool, Walton (Mr. Heffer) has called anyone in this Chamber a liar, he must withdraw it.

Mr. Heffer: If you, Mr. Speaker, insist that under parliamentary rules I withdraw it, I shall withdraw it, but only under parliamentary rules.

Mr. Speaker: Those are the rules under which we all operate.

Mr. Heseltine: The hon. Member for Salford, East (Mr. Allaun) asked me about the view we hold about council tenants.

Mr. Tebbit: Perhaps I can help both my hon. Friend and the hon. Member for Walton. As it happens, a fortnight today I shall be addressing an anti-nationalisation rally in Durham. If the hon. Gentleman or the Secretary of State would like to join me there, to assure everyone that the Labour Party is not proposing any nationalisation in the building industry, I am sure that either of them would be very welcome. I should like a statement from the Secretary of State right now.

Mr. Heseltine: I have no doubt that if they care to give my hon. Friend a letter he will read it out for them in order to save them the trouble of going there.
If the hon. Member for Walton will calm down for a moment perhaps we can get on with the debate. As I want

to talk about council tenants, who are of importance to his constituency, perhaps we can move to that part of what I want to say. The fact is that the economic growth climate of today will lead to an extension of the property-owning democracy on a scale slower than that which we first saw when it was first developed in the 1950s, simply because the real disposable income of the people will not permit the dramatic increase in private ownership on the scale which history once provided. But the council tenant and new town tenant give us the opportunity of extending the property-owning democracy perhaps faster than we have done even under the development of the privately owned house.
The first point is that a large number of council tenants want to own their own homes. The second point is that they understand that if they own their own homes they are likely to share in the rising prosperity of the country in a tangible way which is identifiable with themselves, their families and the saving which their homes represent. It is therefore obviously a major preoccupation, certainly of our party, that council tenants and new town tenants should have the right to buy the home in which they live. I cannot understand why, when my hon. Friend the Member for Ashfield (Mr. Smith) introduced a Bill to give council tenants that right, the Labour Party and the Liberal Party voted against it.
It is a curious anachronism that the Labour Party always talks about transferring power to working people but that the moment someone actually proposes to let them own their own homes and enjoy the power that that gives in the most real and tangible way, thus enfranchising working people on a scale never attempted before, the Labour Party is determined that the closest that power will come to the British working people is the office of some bureaucrat up the road.
Therefore, let me repeat that we in the Conservative Party will give council and new town tenants a statutory right to buy their own homes if they choose to do so. We shall also encourage a flexible range of part-purchase and co-ownership schemes for those in the twilight position—not able to buy but wanting to start on the process of having a stake.

Mr. David Penhaligon: Will the hon. Gentleman give that statutory right in seaside resorts, many of which are represented by members of his party and where already there is a vast transfer of housing out of normal use and into summer lets? Does he recognise this difficulty? Would he give council tenants the right to buy at 20 per cent. off and then to sell to whom they choose? Does he recognise that seaside resorts will become void of housing for working people if such a policy is enacted?

Mr. Heseltine: What a curious thing. The hon. Gentleman wants to deprive the council tenants in his area of the right to become owners because otherwise housing could not be provided for tourist accommodation. What one should do is encourage those tenants to own and if necessary to sell their houses so that they move to areas where there are jobs, perhaps leaving houses which can be used to encourage tourists, thus bringing more jobs and prosperity to the people the hon. Gentleman represents. So the answer to his question is yes—our statutory right will apply to the very people included in his question.
Of course, our policy will not only give an identifiable stake to council tenants; it will also release resources which the local authority or the Government or wherever we decide the money should be allocated to concentrate on the areas of stress, which are or should be our prime concern. Thus, not only do we enhance the position of the council tenant himself but we encourage the community to provide solutions for areas where there are real problems.
Council estates are looking for new initiatives to change the type of life which so many people there have had to lead. It is obvious and accepted that large numbers of council tenants will not want to buy and cannot buy, and we must not neglect them. We want them to be much more involved in administering and playing a part in the management of their estates. There is a powerful argument for experimenting with co-ownership schemes on council estates to give the tenants a much greater identity of interest.
Above all else, as an act of priority—I cannot understand why the Secretary of State has delayed this so long—there should be a tenants' charter to set out

their rights. That is a long overdue provision which this Parliament should put on the statute book. We shall do that, because we believe that it is necessary to involve those tenants more and more in the decisions which affect their lives. In reality, those decisions are so often taken by the bureaucrats who do not live on the estates on which the tenants have to live.
Therefore, my charge against the Government is twofold. First of all, with their policies on taxation and high Government expenditure, they have significantly damaged the provision of new homes. In every year that they have been in office, an average of 40,000 fewer houses have been built than were built by the Conservatives when in power. Secondly by their policy initiatives, their objectives and their administrative decisions, they have demoralised the construction industry, witnessed a dramatic increase in unemployment in the industry, and managed an inadequate programme of housing. On any of those grounds they would deserve criticism but on the combination of all of them, they cannot resist censure.

4.15 p.m.

The Secretary of State for the Environment (Mr. Peter Shore): I greatly welcome this debate, which provides us with an opportunity to review the progress of housing policies. On this occasion it enables me to inform the House of our main conclusions on the housing Green Paper that we published just over a year ago and to outline the general aspect of the legislation that we intend to introduce.
I also welcome of course—one always does—the speech of the hon. Member for Henley (Mr. Heseltine). His speeches are always lively. I sometimes find them a little difficult to follow, because he and I study the same mass of data and information and I sometimes puzzle how it is that we draw such different conclusions from them. Nevertheless, that is what we do. I should therefore begin by describing some of the matters on which we disagree. This is right, because it is almost a year to the day since we last debated housing on an Opposition Supply Day motion, in the context of reviewing the main developments of the past 12 months and the present outlook


I am glad to say—I do not see how anyone could fail to be equally glad if he was interested in housing and in people—that in nearly every sphere of housing policy there has been a considerable improvement since our last debate.
First, we have been able to increase capital expenditure on housing. In the construction package of last October, the Chancellor announced a substantial increase in public expenditure. As part of that, we were able to allocate an additional £170 million to housing investment for 1978–79 and a further £100 million for 1979–80. As those who have studied this year's public expenditure White Paper will know, the housing investment programme is now rising again and the new level will be maintained over the whole period.
Secondly, we have enjoyed another year of moderation in rent increases in the public sector. On average, rents rose by just on 60p a week in 1977–78 and all the signs are that the rise is likely to be less in the current year.
Thirdly, in spite of the setback of 9th June, we have seen over the past 12 months a most welcome fall in mortgage interest rates. When the hon. Member addressed the House on 20th June 1977, the mortgage rate stood at 11¼ per cent. When the latest increase comes into effect, it will be 9¾; per cent. Of course I regret that increase, but 9¾ per cent. is a welcome change from the 1l¾ per cent. of a year ago and the 11 per cent. at which the rate stood when we took office from the previous Administration at the beginning of 1974.
Many millions of owner-occupiers have been helped in the past year by falling mortgage rates. They have been helped, too how the hon. Gentleman can deny this I do not know—by the growing number of building society mortgages which have been available. There were 786,000 mortgage commitments in 1977 and no fewer than 858,000 in the 12 months ending May this year. Both are record figures for mortgage advances.
Fourthly, we have introduced a new and valuable measure to assist first-time purchasers. It will provide for those qualifying—and we expect about 200,000 buyers a year to qualify—an interest-free loan of £600. This will be added to the normal mortgage advance. For many

first-time buyers this will make all the difference in assembling the necessary deposit. Because the loan is interest free for five years, buyers will find their mortgage payments reduced by about £4 a month. On top of this, savers can also qualify for bonus of up to £110—which is cash.
Young couples setting up their first home will understand and appreciate the help they are getting—even if hon. Members opposite continue to lack both comprehension and appreciation. If, as I hope, we shall obtain Royal Assent in the next few weeks, the two-year saving period can begin in the autumn. From that date, prospective buyers can make their plans in the knowledge of the conditions they must fulfil and the help they will receive.

Mr. Tebbit: As the Secretary of State knows, we welcome these proposals, but would he put them in context? Would he agree with me that the £600 loan is rather less than the aggregate amount by which the net take-home pay of the average industrial worker has fallen from the levels at which it stood in February 1974? The net result of the Government's period in office, therefore, is that the average worker gets a loan of £600, having lost that much in cash.

Mr. Shore: The figure that we had in mind for the loan to be available to assist first-time purchasers was conceived only when we announced the measure—just eight or nine months ago. The real relevance of the figure is to the cost of house price increases. This is the significant thing—the relationship between the help that we are giving and the actual prices of houses for sale.
Fifthly, we introduced last year the system of local housing strategies and investment programmes. It requires authorities to prepare capital investment programmes in the light of a comprehensive assesment of their housing needs. These then serve as the basis for the allocation of capital resources by the Government, having regard to national priorities and the resources available.
The new system has only just started. With the help of the new Housing Consultative Council and the input of housing information from the national dwelling and housing survey we shall refine and improve it.

Mr. Frank Allaun: Is it not a fact that among the bigger local authorities. such Conservative-controlled councils as Leeds and Bradford have viciously axed their council house building programmes, whereas the Labour-controlled authorities, such as Sheffield and Manchester have maintained theirs? Since most councils are now Conservative-controlled, can my right hon. Friend do anything to prevent their cutting their housing programmes?

Mr. Shore: My hon. Friend has hit upon a difficult problem. I shall say something later about this. The ability of central government to persuade elected local authorities to build when they have not the will to do so, is extremely limited.

Mr. Heseltine: But is the Secretary of State aware that he has approved only 69 per cent. of the applications from local authorities to spend on council building'? In these circumstances, it is his Department—not the local authorities—that is remiss.

Mr. Shore: That will not do. I saw the astonishing Association of Metropolitan Authorities' release. It was astonishing for two reasons. First, I know for certain that the chairman of the AMA had not seen it, and he has since issued a statement repudiating it. That is quite remarkable in itself. Secondly, the use of figures in the release is so tendentious as to be beyond belief. The bids put in by all local authorities for the first round was for a total sum greater than has ever been spent in any single year on housing. Quite clearly, no Government will simply accept, as it were, the first-off bid of the local authorities. These have to be looked at and pruned down to a sensible size. In addition to that, when we actually know that they are under-spending what we have already allocated, we can only conclude that they have turned the whole thing into a propaganda exercise.
I was talking about the benefits that we have seen already from housing investment programmes. In fact £40 million of the additional £100 million allocation made to local authorities this year went to the North-West Region, in particular to Manchester and Liverpool—the great conurbations. I believe that this system will prove to be an increasingly valuable tool for local and central government

alike in helping us to make the maximum impact on housing needs where they are greatest and where they can be most clearly defined.
Sixthly, we have taken two specific initiatives to increase the rate of home improvement. In August we made very substantial increases in the eligible expense limits for the various improvement grants. At the same time we increased the rateable value limits for discretionary grants for owner-occupiers. These improvements are being buttressed by a major publicity campaign which we launched in March.
I want now to comment on the level of new house building. The house builders' own recent Great Britain forecast for 1978 is for a figure of starts in the private sector totalling 165,000—a considerable increase over the 135,000 private sector houses started in 1977. In the last four months, private sector starts were 15 per cent. up on the same period of last year—not quite the miserable picture that the hon. Gentleman suggests.
In the public sector, however, while completions in 1977 were unaffected and totalled 162,000—almost exactly the same as the totals achieved in 1975 and 1976—starts and still more approvals both fell substantially.
Some of this was unavoidable last year given the measures and new procedures that we had to introduce in July and December of 1976. But what worries me is that, having substantially increased the allocations for housing investment this year, there is still no evidence—in spite of the tendentious stuff that has been quoted—that local authorities are actually increasing the rate of starts and approvals. I have strongly urged them to bring forward schemes, to programme ahead and to take account of the tolerance arrangements.
I do not dismiss the possibility that we are beginning to see a considerable switch into improvement and out of new building in some areas where housing stress is beginning to ease. But I have more than a suspicion that in some other areas where need is still manifestly high—including the Greater London area—unjustified, doctrinally motivated cuts are being made. We have certainly not been helped by the fact that the majority of all housing authorities are under the control


of Conservative councils, many of whom have heeded the advice of the hon. Gentlemen on the Opposition Front Bench.

Mr. Wyn Roberts: Does the Secretary of State mean to say that the failure of the Welsh local authorities three years running to take up the moneys allocated by the Government is doctrinally motivated? And what does he mean by doctrinally motivated, anyway?

Mr. Shore: I mean policy-dominated—a policy which, in the circumstances of housing stress, denies the relevance of public sector building for meeting the need for housing to rent. I am not saying that this is the case with all local authorities, but on the record and evidence of what has been said by the leaders of the various Conservative-controlled councils, no one can dispute that this is precisely what they intend.

Mr. Heseltine: Is the right hon. Gentleman saying that when Labour councillors take action it amounts to economic prudence, but that when Conservative councillors take similar action it is doctrinal obsession?

Mr. Shore: I am glad to say that there is evidence that although, unfortunately, we control a considerably smaller number of councils than the Conservative Party controls, they account for a disproportionate percentage of starts.
I have been concerned about evidence of acceleration of house prices earlier this year. Therefore, with the agreement of the Building Societies Association the exceptionally high volume of mortgage lending was cut back from April of this year. There is now evidence that the acceleration of prices is decreasing. I do not believe we shall see the house price explosion feared by many people a few months ago. However, we shall continue to monitor the situation closely with the building societies and be prepared to adjust the volume of lending as events demand. I do not intend to sit on my hands, as my Conservative predecessors did, while house prices rocket beyond the reach of so many would-be purchasers.
Taking the longer period of the past four years—and I have spoken so far of all that has happened since we last

debated this matter a year ago—we have undoubtedly made real progress in housing policy. One of our major national concerns throughout the whole of this period has been the defeat of hyperinflation. It is noteworthy that since March 1974 rents in both private and public sectors, mortgage repayments and house prices have all increased at a substantially lower rate than has the cost of living generally, and well below the increase in average earnings.
Let me give the House one vivid example. House prices have risen by an average of 8 per cent. per year—32 per cent. in four years from the spring of 1974 to the spring of this year. What a contrast that is with the experience of the four preceding years of Conservative Government when house prices more than doubled. If we are accused of not making adequate provision in our measures to assist first-time purchase, I must point out that if the country were to experience again the house price explosion of the kind that occurred when the Conservatives were last in power, no measure to assist first-time purchasers could stand the strain.
That is by no means all. During this four-year period over 1,200,000 new homes have been completed and a further 800,000 have been substantially improved. There are now 750,000 more owner-occupiers than there were four years ago and, with the co-operation of the building societies, we have during a period of general money instability avoided the feasts and famines of mortgage supply which characterised the period of office of the Conservative Administration.
At the same time we have eased the shortage of rented housing by a substantially increased supply of local authority and Housing Corporation houses. More than 600,000 have been completed in our four-year period. By extending security of tenure in the private rented sector through the 1974 Rent Act—which the Opposition did not vote against either on Second or Third Reading, despite all their carping since—we have substantially cut back on the number of people rendered homeless by eviction from furnished premises.
Last but not least, we have halted the dangerous and damaging land price boom. I do not know whether these


figures have been quoted before, but I would point out that private sector housing land prices rose by over 200 per cent. between March 1970 and March 1974. Between March 1974 and March 1978 they fell by over 20 per cent. That is the measure of the difference between the attitudes of the two parties.
All this adds up to a formidable achievement. When I add, as I should, the provisions of the Housing Act 1974, which gave a new impetus to housing association activity, the Housing Rents and Subsidies Act 1975, which repealed the Housing Act 1972 and restored to local authorities the right to determine reasonable but non-profit rents, the Rent (Agriculture) Act 1976, which remedied a long-standing injustice suffered by farm workers, the Housing (Homeless Persons) Act 1977, on which the Government gave full support to the hon. Member for Isle of Wight (Mr. Ross), and our Homes Insulation Bill, which is now under discussion in Parliament, it will be seen that our legislative record is most impressive.

Mr. Michael Latham: Is that all the Secretary of State intends to say on the subject of land—namely the jejeune comments he made a moment ago? Has he nothing to say about the failure of the Community Land Act?

Mr. Shore: A great deal has been said about the Community Land Act, and not least about the excellent Press conference held yesterday by my ministerial colleague. The truth about the Community Land Act, contrary to the absurd charges which have been made, is that we have had just two years of its operation. In the second year of that period, for reasons I very much regret, we have had to reduce its activities. We are now setting aside substantial new resources for that Act and we expect it to be able to fulfil many of the purposes orginally set out for it.
Against that background of achievement, what have the Opposition to say? Of course they carp and crib, but what are the distinctive alternative policies of the Conservative Party? Encouragement of owner-occupation is not a distinctive policy. The fact that the majority of households are owner-occupied and that the number is constantly growing owes just as much to the Labour side of the

House as to the Conservative Benches and gives equal satisfaction. Indeed, since we are the authors of the Home Purchase Assistance Bill, I do not think our credentials can be doubted.
It is not a one-off measure. As anybody who has attended debates and Question Times on housing matters will know, one of the main matters of concern repeatedly expressed on this side of the House is mortgage availability in general and a special concern for the supply of mortgage money for low income families. Indeed, it is no accident that the last major piece of legislation extending owner-occupation was the option mortgage scheme introduced by my late colleague and friend, Richard Crossman, when he was Minister of Housing. Therefore, there is nothing between the two sides of the House in the wish to extend owner-occupation.
What then does divide us? It came out clearly from the remarks of the hon. Member for Henley. It is the Opposition's manifest and obsessive dislike of local authority council housing. The origins are clear enough. It is their long-held belief that the taxpayer and the ratepayer contribute too much and the council tenant too little to the cost of council housing. Is that not the case?

Mr. Heseltine: If the right hon. Gentleman is looking for an immediate answer, my answer will be different from his. The reason why I personally and my party are preoccupied with enfranchising the council tenants is that we believe that the owner-occupier has achieved a real personal stake in the value of his home. That gives him a degree of power and involvement which has been denied to the council tenant.
Let me give the Secretary of State one statistic. A man who bought an average-priced new house 20 years ago paid £2,500 for it. That house is now worth £13,000. That has opened a gap between the achievement of the owner-occupier and the council tenant that is becoming unbridgeable. That is why I want to give council tenants the right to own their own homes.

Mr. Shore: I am very much in favour of council tenants being able to become owner-occupiers, and I am glad to say that between 40,000 and 60,000 a year become owner-occupiers. The issue is not


whether they should become owner-occupiers. We are to extend the provisions of our Home Purchase Bill so that council tenants can also make use of it. The issue is whether they should become owner-occupiers and take their houses out of the pool of rented properties. The hon. Member for Henley said that this is what he wants to do.
I have said that the major belief of the Opposition was that the taxpayer and the ratepayer contribute too much and the council tenant too little to the cost of council housing. So strongly was this view held in the last Conservative Administration that they took the extraordinary legislative powers in the Housing Finance Act 1972 to remove the right of local authorities to determine their own rent levels.
The same attitude is there today. No statement of Conservative economic policy is complete without a reference to the inordinate cost of council housing and the inclusion of housing subsidies in any short list of retrenchment measures to savage public expenditure. It is time that the country knew what the Conservative Party has in mind. I have heard a figure of £500 million mentioned. No doubt the hon. Member for Henley can confirm whether this is the order of magnitude of saving that they wish to make. Let me tell him that such a drop in housing subsidies would be equivalent to an increase of £2 a week in unrebated rents.
Let me tell the hon. Gentleman this too: it is simply not on for him to contemplate major reductions in subsidies to council tenants while, at the same time, the Conservatives pledge themselves to new and still more costly subsidies to owner-occupiers. I do not know whether the 91 per cent. building society mortgage rate ceiling which the Leader of the Opposition offered the nation at the last General Election is still Tory policy. Is it?

Mr. Heseltine: I am grateful for the chance to point out that if one wanted to save money on housing subsidies, as the right hon. Gentleman charges us with wanting to do, the most effective way of doing it would be to encourage council tenants to buy their own homes. I believe that it is statistically accurate to

say that if every council house were sold for £2,500, no subsidies would be required.

Mr. Shore: I shall not give way to the hon. Gentleman again. I gave way to enable him to answer a specific question and he refused to answer it. He need not have bothered to intervene.
The cost of the Opposition's proposal for a 9½ per cent. mortgage rate ceiling would have been about £600 million in the last four years and their grant proposals, offered as an alternative to our loans proposal for first-time purchasers, would cost at least an extra £350 million a year.
I can well understand why, as we approach the last Session of this Parliament, the Opposition should wish to say as little as possible about cutting housing subsidies and raising rents and I can see why the idea of mass sales of local authority dwellings appears to be rather more attractive. The hon. Member for Henley gave us his views today and reports of his speech to the annual Conservative Women's conference in London on 22nd May said that the hon. Gentleman told the conference that
people on council estates had to be attracted to the Tory party … Tories had to communicate with people on council estates and in new towns.
That is sage advice.
What are they now proposing? They propose a policy of large-scale and indiscriminate sales of council houses. They intend, they say, to introduce a right to buy which will be available to all council tenants. Indeed, such is their enthusiasm for this policy that we now have the hon. Member for Henley appearing, somewhat improbably, as the defender of the council tenant, solemnly proclaiming not that he is paying too little—the old and familiar cry—but rather that he is paying too much and is getting a raw deal.
I need to say only three things about this. First, I believe that the alleged financial gains to the Exchequer would prove to be illusory. The fact is that over time, the loss of rent income to the local authority and the cost of increased mortgage relief to the Exchequer would more than cancel out any supposed advantages in terms of reduced housing management cost and housing subsidy.
Secondly, I do not believe that, in practice, substantial sales would be achieved—certainly not on the basis of a reasonable selling price including the present discounts. Well over half of the housing authorities are in Conservative hands and yet they managed to sell only just over 12,000 houses in 1977.

Mr. Joseph Dean: Is my right hon. Friend aware that for every 1,000 council houses sold, the cost to councils of replacing them over the 60-year loan repayment period within which local authorities buy their houses would be a minimum of £70 million?

Mr. Shore: If the local authority had to start building new houses, it would lose all the advantages of historic cost and pooling and it would be much more expensive. My hon. Friend has made an important point.
I want to make plain that a policy of selling off council houses in areas of housing shortage—and they will inevitably be those most sought after because of their situation, their gardens and their amenities—would be socially irresponsible.
I think the hon. Member for Henley knows this to be true, which is why his hon. Friend the Member for Hornsey (Mr. Rossi) recently went so far as to suggest that council houses should be sold at a 50 per cent. discount. They have almost caught up with the right hon. Member for Worcester (Mr. Walker) who thought that they should be given away. I do not believe they have seriously reflected on what these proposals involve.
We do not intend to enter into a Dutch auction with the Conservative Party. We have pursued since the beginning of this Parliament a policy that local authorities, which have a duty to provide for the housing needs in their areas, should exercise responsibly the freedom given them to make decisions about the sale of council houses. We expect those in areas of housing stress to use that power with the utmost restraint.

Mr. Reginald Eyre: Has the Secretary of State realised that the problems of council tenants, particularly in the large towns and cities, are the area of housing policy most neglected by the Government? Can

he explain why Labour Members last year voted against my Council Tenants' Charter Bill and why this year, after I had introduced such a Bill, from which no one dissented, the Government Whips repeatedly blocked it every Friday so that we have never had the chance to debate those problems? That is real neglect of the people living in council houses.

Mr. Shore: I am a great admirer of the hon. Gentleman, but I did not think that his proposal was one of the better proposals that he has put forward. We have been working hard on a tenants' charter and it would have been absurd for us to attempt to erect what we wish to erect on a rather inadequate foundation.
I want to return from the rather dismal world of Opposition housing policies to the real world of housing and serious policy making. A year ago, the Government published a Green Paper on housing policy in England and Wales and issued a series of consultation papers on particular topics.
The Green Paper has attracted many responses from those concerned with housing throughout the country. I want to thank all those who have put so much effort into preparing the responses. We have given them serious study and it is right that I should now, before dealing with our specific proposals, tell the House the conclusions that the Government have reached.
First, and very important, we shall continue to provide general Exchequer assistance to both main housing sectors. We shall continue to subsidise local authority housing, and we shall continue to afford tax relief on mortgage interest to owner-occupiers. These are tried arrangements and have been the foundation of the major housing achievement that Britain has had under successive Administrations in the post-war era. Thus we oppose the pseudo-radical alternatives of market pricing and the doctrine of shared misery for home buyers and council tenants alike, both deprived of Exchequer support. Of course, we oppose the Opposition's proposals for a one-sided assault on public sector subsidies. In short, we shall not see millions of household budgets disrupted by rising rents and net mortgage payments through savage cuts in either subsidies or tax relief. Our approach is an even-handed one,


because we genuinely recognise the value and importance of both sectors.
Secondly, we reaffirm the need for a more selective and discerning approach to housing policy designed to concentrate resources where needs are greatest—both as regards people and places—and the need to widen individual choice.
Thirdly, we reaffirm the importance of the public sector to the steady improvement of housing conditions.
Fourthly, we support the increasing and broadening desire for home ownership. We shall work with the financial institutions to ensure as stable and adequate a flow of mortgage funds as economic circumstances permit.
Finally, we shall increase our efforts to improve both the quality of the housing stock and the balance between rehabilitation and new construction.
The House will realise that a number of these proposals call for legislation and I want to say a word about the wide-ranging legislative proposals that we are currently preparing. There will be a new subsidy system resting on three cardinal principles. These will be the retention of the non-profit rule, the right of local authorities to settle their own rent levels and the extent of any contribution from the rate fund, and that average rents should rise no faster than average income.
Our aim is to recast the present subsidy system in order gradually to provide a more adequate share of resources for those authorities confronted with the most pressing needs and the highest costs. In doing so, we shall ensure that tenants are not faced with savage and unexpected increases in rents. The amount of subsidy that an authority receives would be based on the subsidy paid to it for the preceding year. That sum would then be increased or decreased by taking into account changes in their qualifying expenditure and the increase in their local contribution from rent and rates.

Mr. Arthur Latham: It would be helpful in the context of some matters that I wish to raise in the debate if my right hon. Friend gave some indication of what he regards as a savage and unacceptable increase in rent.

Mr. Shore: I have indicated that we have in mind a ceiling. That ceiling

would be an increase in rent equal to the increase in average earnings. That is the main test, as it were.
We shall also take the opportunity to make appropriate adjustments to the subsidy arrangements for new towns and housing associations.

Mr. Michael Morris: rose—

Mr. Shore: No, I shall not give way.
The new legislation will also provide a package—it is a matter of particular interest to many others—of legal rights for public sector tenants. The first of these is security of tenure, which the Government are already pledged to extend to public sector tenants. The second is a statutory right of tenants to carry out improvements and to apply for the same grants as are available to home owners. In addition tenants will have a right to a written tenancy agreement. We are also considering an obligation on the local authority to provide a framework for participation with their tenants on matters which affect their interests.
I also propose to safeguard the interests of people seeking council housing by requiring local authorities to publish their allocation schemes, as many do, and, in the interests of mobility, to ease but not abolish residential qualifications.
Statutory rights for public sector tenants must be supported with better management and better upkeep. The quality of the immediate environment of all our council estates needs continuing attention and we want a particular effort to be made to improve the management of our older housing estates and of the less successful of our newer estates, especially in our hard-pressed inner urban areas. I intend to make sure that the new subsidy system will give local authorities more scope to devote resources to management and maintenance and to concentrate them where the need is greatest. We shall be encouraging local authorities in these areas to consider new initiatives, including the linking of housing management with wider community and neighbourhood schemes.
For owner-occupiers I have already mentioned the Home Purchase Assistance Bill. We now envisage two further measures. First, we shall enable local authorities to keep their mortgage interest


rates in line with those charged by building societies. At the same time we propose to strengthen the power of local authorities to provide guarantees to building societies where they lend to people on lower incomes or those who are buying cheaper, older houses.
I have already touched on some aspects of the private rented sector but the House will wish to know what progress we have made in our review of the Rent Acts.
As we said in the Green Paper, there is a long-established and deep-seated trend in the contraction of the private rented sector. However, there are some 2 million households still living in privately rented accommodation and so the sector will be of importance for a considerable period ahead. In particular, the sector is still an important source of accommodation for the young mobile as well as for certain other groups. There are wide-ranging and interlocking issues to be considered. The Rent Acts, as consolidated in 1977—a consolidation measure—run to nearly 200 pages of text. Well over 2,000 decided legal cases bear on the Acts' interpretation, and they continue to come in thick and fast. In spite of their origins as a temporary measure, the Acts have been part of the code of social legislation in this country for over 60 years under Administrations of all parties. I make no apology therefore—I say this to some critics on the Opposition Benches—for rejecting facile answers, or for considering with care what effect on people and homes any changes might have.
When I have reached my conclusions I shall, of course, report to the House. Meanwhile, I can give an assurance on two major points of immediate concern to all who live in private rented housing.
The first assurance is that on the weight of evidence I have seen I am certain that the principle of rent regulation should remain intact. It is basically sound and it contributes to a stability that we all want in family budgets.
Secondly, I remain committed to the principle of security of tenure for the tenant of what I might call the professional or non-resident landlord, though I believe there is scope for marginal adjustments designed to bring accommodation let with a business, such as flats over shops, back into use. I am also con-

vinced that there is a considerable potential reserve of accommodation for letting available in owner-occupied homes. We must encourage its use. This is why I want to speed up the procedures under which resident landlords and owner-occupiers, who have moved temporarily away, sometimes abroad, may regain possession. I would add that I am giving closer consideration to means of stopping the loopholes which some professional landlords appear to be using to thwart the basic principles of the Acts.
I am also considering what further steps may be taken to improve the physical state of the private rented stock and ensure that necessary repairs are carried out.
Finally, on the general question of rehabilitation we now propose to take further statutory measures to make grants more readily available, to extend to both private and public sector tenants the right to grant aid for improvement works and to extend the availability of repair grants.
As the House will recognise, a substantial measure is in preparation and I want to introduce it at the earliest opportunity. We have done much, but there is still clearly much to do.
Good housing and choice of housing are essential to the contentment and wellbeing of our people. We shall not abandon those in greatest housing need to a market in which they cannot compete. We shall steer resources where they can do most good—to ensure that the needs of the weakest and most often overlooked are systematically catered for and to spread the benefits of good and reasonably priced housing as widely throughout this country as we can. We promised, in the very first chapter of the Housing Green Paper, to continue to give the high priority to housing that its importance merits. We have done so throughout this Parliament, and we shall continue to do so in the Parliament that is to follow.

Several Hon. Members: rose—

Mr. Deputy Speaker (Mr. Oscar Murton): Order. Before I call the next hon. Member, I understand that Mr. Speaker made an appeal for short speeches. Some 30 right hon. and hon. Members hope to catch the eye of the


Chair. It will be in the interests of the House if they pay heed to what Mr. Speaker said.

5.1 p.m.

Mr. Julian Amery: I think that the whole House is grateful to the Secretary of State for the frankness with which he set forth the yardstick by which he proposes to measure the rate of increase in council house rents. He said that it should be roughly in line with the rate of increase in wages. I take that to mean that in the current year 15 per cent. will be about the minimum increase which we can expect. [HON. MEMBERS: "Ceiling."] If we had gone back to 1974–75, we would have been facing 30 to 40 per cent. increases.

Mr. Shore: I am sure that the right hon. Gentleman would not wish to misquote what I said. I actually used the word "ceiling", and I meant it.

Mr. Amery: The House will draw its own conclusions from what the Secretary of State said.
I want to concentrate on the sale of council houses. I was delighted to hear the Secretary of State pay tribute to the importance of home ownership. That is one of the main aspirations of the majority of people in this country. There is at last a majority of home owners. It is to the Government's credit that that majority has become clearly established during their tenure of office.
When I was Minister for Housing and Construction I concentrated largely on the private sector and advanced the proposition, and secured acceptance from my colleagues, that council houses could be sold at a discount of up to 30 per cent. I did so primarily for social reasons. I thought it tremendously important that the individual should be given the opportunity to own his own home. As my hon. Friend the Member for Henley (Mr. Heseltine) pointed out, there is no better way of achieving a major transfer of wealth than the transfer of property owned by local authorities to individuals. I refer to the social reason for the sale of council houses. But they are not the only reasons.
Since my time at the Department of the Environment, we have come into a much deeper economic crisis. We all

understand that increased productivity is the key to our economic recovery. We also understand that the one key to increased productivity is mobility. We shall get mobility of labour only if the working man in one part of the country is able to move easily to another area.
At the moment, the tenant of a council house is in a sense, a serf. He cannot lightly abandon the home in which he lives as a tenant, because he has no certainty of securing a home anywhere else. If he had a home to sell and he lived in the South, he could get a home in the North cheaper than he had in the South. If he lived in the North, he could get a home in the South but would probably have to spend a little more. However, he would have complete freedom of movement.
The United Kingdom has one of the highest tenanted populations in Europe, if not in the world—even including the other side of the Iron Curtain. I think that only Czechoslovakia is behind us in this respect.
It is clear from the figures which I have obtained that if there were no council housing at all the saving would be about £500 million to taxpayers and ratepayers.

Mr. Douglas-Mann: Rubbish.

Mr. Amery: It is not rubbish. I can substantiate that figure if the hon. Gentleman wishes me to do so. I have the figures here. At the moment, total rebated rents bring in £923 million. Management costs are £244 million, repairs £377 million and social security over and above the rebate £380 million. That leaves a deficit of £78 million on the overall account.
If we adopted the scheme advocated by my right hon. Friend the Member for Worcester (Mr. Walker)—I am not saying, at this stage, that we should—rents would be £850 million in the first year, going down to about £800 million in subsequent years. The collection costs would be £43 million and the social security costs would be £350 million—almost as much as before. Therefore, there would be a saving of £457 million on my right hon. Friend's calculations, coming down to £406 million after 10 years.

Mr. Douglas-Mann: I do not want to be unkind to a former Minister for Housing and Construction. However, dies he


appreciate that the rental income from council housing rises each year? With any given stock of housing and with any degree of inflation, that income continues to increase. If we sell those council houses, there will be a subsidy on mortgage which, every time a house is sold—and a house is sold on average every seven years—will rise to a new level. That subsidy will continue into the future, growing greater and greater. If we built no further council houses, we would gradually move into a consistent level of profit from council housing. The right hon. Gentleman's figures are totally fallacious. I am surprised that he should present them.

Mr. Amery: We shall never make a profit on council houses. There is already a heavy deficit and there is every indication that it will continue.
How should we proceed to sell more council houses? I address myself more particularly to my right hon. and hon. Friends. Considering today's valuations, the 30 per cent. discount which I introduced would be quite inadequate to produce large-scale buying of council houses by council tenants. It is out of their reach in most cases, except at the lower end of the council housing scale.
My right hon. Friend the Member for Worcester has produced his plan. His proposal is that anyone who has lived in a council house for 30 years should get it free and that other tenants should have their rents converted into mortgages. He claims that that would produce a national saving on taxes and rates of about £450 million, reducing to £406 million over 10 years. That would be an important relief in taxation and rates. It is about the figure for which the Chancellor is looking as a result of amendments that the Opposition have made to the Finance Bill. It would also make an important contribution to the increased expenditure to which the Opposition are committed on defence.
Would it be a burden on councils? It does not look like it. As I pointed out in reply to the hon. Member for Mitcham and Morden (Mr. Douglas-Mann), there is an existing annual deficit of about £80 million on council house rents.
The main objection to the proposal put forward by my right hon. Friend the Member for Worcester is one of equity.

Some people say that it is unfair on those who have been saving with building societies to buy their own homes that council house tenants should be allowed overnight, by a stroke of the pen, either to possess their houses free because they have lived in them for 30 years or to possess them as if they were their own, their rents being regarded as mortgage payments. That would be something of a dog-in-the-manger attitude, because if, as my right hon. Friend argues, there would be a saving of £450 million in terms of rates and taxation, clearly the public as a whole would benefit from it, and that would include mortgage holders. I recognise, however, that the contrary view is strongly held and that politics is the art of the possible.
We should, therefore, go as far as is practicable along the road that my right hon. Friend has indicated. Whether we do that by giving a much bigger discount—60 or 70 per cent.—on the sale of a house or whether we do it by some increase in rents for those who choose to adopt them as mortgages instead of rents, I do not know. That is something that my right hon. and hon. Friends can work out between now and the General Election. It is a matter for them. I am not dogmatic about how we do it. What I care about is that we should aim to make house purchase not merely attractive, but irresistibly attractive to the council house tenant.
I congratulate my right hon. Friend the Member for Worcester on having launched his idea. Whether his policy in total is acceptable is another question. The important thing is that we as a party should make it clear that a policy for the sale of council houses which is undoubtedly in itself popular in the country should not only be right in principle but should be practical. The policy today is not practical. The cost is too great. I therefore want my hon. Friend the Member for Homsey (Mr. Rossi), who is to reply to the debate for the Opposition, to indicate that we are committed to finding a way of making a policy which is not only right in principle but practical in application.

5.12 p.m.

Miss Joan Lestor: My constituency is well known for several features, an outstanding one of which is that it has a huge and thriving trading


estate which, over the years, has attracted from many parts of this country and from abroad large numbers of people seeking, and, happily, finding work. Unfortunately, for various reasons the constituency has never been able to meet the demands that being a magnet of labour has put upon it.
We are also fortunate in being an area of very high employment. We do not have the problems experienced by Merseyside and other areas of large-scale unemployment. It is therefore understandable that many people should come to Slough looking for work. Clearly, that places enormous strains upon the housing resources of the local authority, and it would do so even if the authority were hell-bent on solving its housing problems. The fact that it is working in the opposite direction makes increasingly difficulty the plight both of people who have lived in Slough for many years and those who have come there more recently. I have been to see my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State about this matter more than once.
I was struck by the strength of advocacy of the sale of council houses advanced by the right hon. Member for Brighton, Pavilion (Mr. Amery) and the hon. Member for Henley (Mr. Heseltine). I have noticed no clamour by my constituents to buy the council houses in which they live, but perhaps that is another story. The sale of council houses in an area such as mine is indefensible.
I should be interested to hear the views of the right hon. Member and his hon. Friend about a local authority that builds council houses for sale and then advertises them outside its own area. That is what has been happening in Slough. Few people, even among those who live in council houses, have taken the opportunity of buying council houses in the area. But even given Tory Party policy on the sale of council houses I should have thought that the activities of the Slough Council merited a few sharp words from the Opposition. In spite of our housing problems, the only houses being built in Slough for the local authority are those that were started when the authority was under Labour control.
Because of the peculiarities and difficulties of my constituency I welcomed

the Housing (Homeless Persons) Bill when it was introduced by the hon. Member for Isle of Wight (Mr. Ross). That Bill subsequently became part and parcel of Government policy. When it became law one of the local newspapers in my constituency carried a headline which, in effect said, in quoting one of the councillors, "New Dehli, Heathrow Airport and a No. 81 Bus to a Slough Council House." I sent a copy of that headline to my right hon. Friend and he wrote to me about it.
The intention of the person who made that statement and of the sad reproduction of it by the local Press was to give the impression that people coming to this country would automatically qualify for a council house. It was designed to drive a wedge between the sections of the community in my constituency.
When the Housing (Homeless Persons) Bill became law the Slough council passed a resolution to the effect that the borough council should adopt a restricted interpretation of the Act in order to protect the interests of all the residents of the borough. Since it adopted that strict interpretation the council has been censured by the local government ombudsman for trying to avoid its responsibilities towards one family that came before it. Ultimately it had to rehouse that family. The authority has also got itself into great difficulties with Shelter, an organisation for which I have a great deal of respect and time, because of the way in which it dealt with a number of cases that Shelter had brought to its notice.
The local authority in my area is behaving in a way that will make a bad situation much worse. Because of the effect of industry in attracting labour to the area it should be pursuing a policy that will solve the local housing problems. The passing of the homeless persons Act is being ignored in my area, an area where it could have greater application than anywhere else in the country because of the number of people who come there looking for jobs.
Many people have come forward, either because of the activities of various agencies or of their own free will, seeking rehousing. They believe that they qualify, but judgment has been passed upon them that they do not. In some respects that judgment is correct, while in


others it blatantly is not so. Although the numbers seeking rehousing have increased, since the Act was passed, the numbers being rehoused have not. It is pointless for the House to pass legislation to protect people such as these—people who, through no fault of their own, become homeless in an area where they are seeking work—if the local authority in question is determined to apply a restrictive interpretation to the application of the Act. My local authority has taken the best legal advice it could get in order to avoid its responsibilities under that Act, and is is avoiding those responsibilities.
This leads me to suggest that my right hon. Friend should be monitoring the working of the Act because it is not doing anything like the job it was intended to do. He should give some time and thought to the problems of areas such as mine, which have a strong industrial base and which will continue to attract labour from all over the country for many years—no one is quarrelling with that—but which need an urgent housing policy to cope with the problems that that situation is bound to throw up. If something is not done in respect of both of these things, I fear the consequences.
There is a company in my constituency which wishes to expand its activities in the area, which would provide an increasing number of jobs. If the expansion ultimately takes place, obviously it will attract labour from other parts of the country, because we do not have enough labour in Slough. The company has said to me "If we cannot find the means whereby we can see that these people will be able to be rehoused, rather than increase the incredible number of people who will be homeless in the area we shall seek to expand our activities in one of our subsidiaries in the EEC".
I do not want to see that happen, nor do I think anyone else does. However, given the activities of the Slough Corporation and the expansion of the industrial base of Slough, on which we have built our whole economic buoyancy and which has done such a great deal for the economic well-being of the surrounding area, I believe that urgent consideration needs to be given to the future

housing policy of Slough, to couple it with the expansion of its industry.

5.21 p.m.

Mr. Iain MacCormick: Nothing which has transpired so far in the debate has changed my view that one of the most divisive aspects of society in the United Kingdom today is housing and the way in which society is divided into those who live in council housing and those who live in privately owned houses.
This is very sad. It has been shown already during the debate. It was instanced by the hon. Member for Henley (Mr. Heseltine) in his exchange with the hon. Member for Salford, East (Mr. Allaun). I am very glad that it is part and parcel of the Scottish National Party's policy on housing that
Housing should not be used to further any ideological end, or to punish or bribe particular groups or as a weapon in the Treasury's armoury of demand management.
I feel quite certain that this is the atmosphere in which we should be tackling the problem. From what has been said today, I am not convinced that the Conservative Party has a real and ideal counter to what it sees as being the present situation in council housing.
However, as I do not imagine that many speakers representing Scottish seats will be speaking in this debate, I should like to look briefly at the housing situation in Scotland. I suppose it must be obvious to anyone in the House, regardless of the part of Great Britain he represents, that the housing problem in Scotland is much worse than it is in other parts of the United Kingdom. It is not only very much worse; it is of a slightly different nature.
The Secretary of State said that the majority of people are home owners. That is not so in Scotland. I believe I am correct in saying that in Scotland the proportion of the housing stock that is publicly owned as council housing is higher than it is in any other country in Europe, this side of the Iron Curtain. That is not something in which we in Scotland take pride but it is something that we have to examine carefully if we are to find the right way to tackle the problem.
Not only is the nature of the problem in Scotland slightly different; the degree is certainly frightening in its intensity. I


believe that there are still about 250,000 houses in Scotland lacking in the basic amenities. I believe there are still about 180,000 that are below the minimum tolerable standards. These are things in which, regardless of party, no one who represents Scotland or has the interests of Scotland at heart can take any pride whatsoever.
It is obvious to hon. Members that many of these conditions are often to be found particularly in urban areas. However, in view of one of the comments made earlier by the hon. Member for Henley about holiday resorts and rural areas, one ought to bear in mind that one of the things that the Cullingworth Report showed was that, regardless of how beautiful a facade a community might have or an individual house might have, often what lies behind that facade presents an entirely different picture and that, indeed, in some of the rural areas of Scotland, as is the case in some other parts of the United Kingdom as well, there are extremely bad conditions. In my own constituency of Argyll far too many houses are below the minimum tolerable standards.
As for council housing, it is a fact, sadly, that it is not just old council houses—those built prior to the Second World War—that are often below standard; even new council housing in Scotland, certainly in at least one instance in my constituency, falls far below what I should regard as being a proper environment for any person in this part of the twentieth century to live in.
I am probably correct in saying that Argyll is one of the most sparsely populated counties in one of the most sparsely populated countries in Europe, yet in my own home town of Oban there is a council housing estate, built just a few years ago, on which the density of people per acre is higher than in any similar project that has been carried out in Western Europe virtually within living memory. This is the sort of thing that is utterly wrong. If we as a society are using large sums of money to help in the provision of housing, we must be sure that we provide the right kind of housing—housing that people would want to buy. No one would dream of wanting to buy one of the houses to which I am referring, even if

they were being put up for sale much more freely than is at present the case.
I want to make a few comments about home ownership and council housing. I believe, as I think everyone present believes, that as many people as possible should be encouraged to own their own houses, but I am not at all convinced that what the Conservative Party, through the medium of the hon. Member for Henley, says about the sale of council houses is either practicable or just. Clearly, in every place where council housing exists there are some extremely nice council houses, in what are called high amenity areas, and there are some simply awful council houses. It is a matter of common sense that were we to pursue a policy of simply saying "Right. We shall sell any house that anyone wants to buy," we would certainly be left with a situation in which local authorities would be lumbered with the worst houses and with deteriorating housing. That would offend my instincts of justice in the whole matter of the provision of what is, after all, the most important thing that any family is likely either to own or to rent.
There are all kinds of ways by which we can arrive at a happy medium concerning the sale of council houses, but there is no magic solution. There is no wand that anyone, be he a member of the Conservative Party or any other party, can wave to find an instant answer.
Indeed, I must say, in parenthesis, that one of the less educating aspects of the Conservative Party these days is that its members seem to believe that they can make instant policies for any given situation that arises, regardless of the cost in either financial or social terms.
The Secretary of State spoke about "savage and unacceptable increases in rent," and took pride in having avoided those savage and unacceptable increases, but we must remember that we are not all talking in terms of rent. In my part of Scotland, in the constituency of Argyll, many householders have recently been faced with savage and utterly unacceptable increases in rates. No debate on the subject of housing can ignore that situation. If, on the one hand, we are trying to encourage people to own their own homes, we must, on the other hand, make quite certain that we do not impose


intolerable financial burdens on people who achieve that happy state of affairs.
Clearly, as a spokesman for the Scottish National Party, I look forward to the day when a Scottish Assembly is set up. I look forward to a time when we shall genuinely see the whole question of housing policy in Scotland removed from the worst aspects of political confrontation. I look forward with confidence to the setting up of a Ministry of Housing in Scotland which will be able to pay much closer attention to the problem than is paid at present.

5.29 p.m.

Mr. Arthur Latham: I ask my right hon. Friend to make at least some passing reference to the current issue of the transfer of London housing estates from the GLC to the London boroughs. The London Labour Party conference early this year decisively expressed a view against the transfer of such estates, because it believe that this will militate against the interests of the inner London boroughs and that outer London has a moral obligation to play a part in London's strategic housing as a whole.
Is it still the Secretary of State's view that the transfer of such estates should not be on a piecemeal basis? If that is his view, can my right hon. Friend clarify what he would regard as piecemeal transfers? Secondly, can he agree that he would wish to safeguard the opportunities for mobility of labour and of tenancies within the Greater London area, and that any transfer must have adequate safeguards for the staff involved?
The hon. Member for Argyll (Mr. MacCormick) referred to differences in the kinds of housing that might be sold; some might be good purchases by tenants, and some might not be such good propositions. Given that there is equality of opportunity to buy property—which is not the case—if housing in London is sold it will mean that those who are now flat dwellers, particularly those in high-rise blocks, will have no prospect whatsoever of obtaining a house near the ground or with a garden.
One of the worries in inner London is that in its anxiety to opt out of its overall housing responsibilities the now Tory-controlled GLC will apply pressure, which will mean that if London boroughs

do not readily take over the stock the GLC will try to sell off its existing housing stock to any comers, such as housing associations, squatting groups, and so on, which have been interested in such purchases.
The consequence of that will be the creation of an additional problem for inner London, and I am advised that whilst the Secretary of State is considering proposals that come before him the GLC may do its best to sell off what housing stock it can, on either a collective or an individual basis, before a decision is made by the Secretary of State about the transfer of estates under the London Government Act. If my right hon. Friend will not place a total embargo on council house sales in the London area, I ask him at least to call a halt to sales until the issue of the transfer of estates has been determined, so that the GLC does not get the opportunity to sell off property—and some of the best property—before a transfer takes place.
The right hon. Gentleman who has left the Chamber and whose constituency I cannot remember—I think he will he recognised if I say that he is the right hon. Gentleman who, when he was Minister for Housing and Construction, sounded for all the world as though he was still at the Foreign Office, and still does—spoke of the lack of equity in selling off council accommodation. The one question that is never answered is this: what responsibility does the present-day council tenant have to others who are on the waiting list? Is it not the simple fact that an average of 5 per cent, of council dwellings become vacant in the course of a year and contribute to meet the needs of those on the waiting list? It means that for every 20 council houses sold, one more family is deprived of the opportunity of which those purchasing the council houses were glad to avail themselves when they were on the waiting list. It is that moral question that needs to be answered in this argument.
I take this opportunity to congratulate my right hon. Friend on two matters. One relates to the security of tenure given to my constituents in furnished, privately rented accommodation. The evictions, in numbers and in circumstances, were appalling before the passing of the 1974 legislation. Secondly, I thank my right hon. Friend the Minister for Housing and


Construction for his chivvying of Westminster City Council over the inadequacy of its housing improvement programme and its general housing provision. I place on record—I think that my right hon. Friend will agree with me—the tremendous service done to the homeless and badly housed in Paddington by the Paddington federation of tenants and residents in its publication "Home Truths", which I know was of great assistance to my right hon. Friend in trying to pursue the interests of those on the waiting list and in housing need in my constituency.
However, I remain extremely disappointed that the Government have still not responded to the proposals made by my hon. Friend the Member for Salford, East (Mr. Allaun) in the Private Member's Bill which he sought to promote and which I had the opportunity to present on his behalf on one occasion. The Government have not responded to the tremendous scandal of the number of empty properties that still remain in the London area. I know that the hon. Member for Hornsey (Mr. Rossi) argues that this is somehow a consequence of giving security of tenure. All I say is that if the supply of homes that was previously available as a consequence of evicting people has dried up, that is no loss.
In the areas of London with which I am familiar I have not seen the proof of cause and effect which the hon. Member for Hornsey claims. My understanding is that many properties remain empty simply because that enhances the selling price, especially of blocks of flats. If there are a few empty flats it enhances the market value considerably during a period of inflation. That is the motivation for keeping the properties empty, because the appreciation in value is greater than any rental income that is lost for the period during which the properties remain empty. Because of the desperate housing situation in London, one answer is to provide a system of compulsorily letting that accommodation so that we do not have this ghastly situation in which people are homeless, while nearby there are hundreds, or perhaps even thousands, of empty properties which they could occupy.
The major matter to which I am obliged to draw attention in this debate is

the problem of the tenants of privately rented properties in my constituency and in similar areas. The Secretary of State may rightly say that he believes that the Rent Act is basically sound, but I can tell him—he has had much evidence from me in past years—that in my constituency the Rent Acts are working extremely badly against the interests of ordinary people. It is a problem that is not common to the country as a whole; it is peculiar to London, and only to some parts of London, at that.
I know that Kensington and Chelsea are similarly affected, as are Marylebone, South Westminster, some parts of Islington, some parts of Camden, and some parts of Battersea. I may not have identified all the areas. I have recently had some evidence from Streatham. It is a problem which affects certain areas which are subject to abnormal pressures. The pressures to which I am referring are those of the West End, of Central London, of creeping hotelisation, the demand for holiday lets, and the general explosion of the Oxford Street area to the west and north-west.
Another factor which cannot be ignored is the influence of Arab oil money coming into the southern part of my constituency, and Kensington and Chelsea, which has also helped to force up rent levels. The evidence is pragmatic, because one can drive round those areas, where, nowadays, one will see estate agents' notice boards outside properties with advertisements in both English and Arabic as a matter of course. This is the nature of the market and a measure of the demand. These are some of the pressures that are pushing up the levels of private rents to an excessive extent.
I ask for some kind of comfort, even if it be cold comfort, that there will be recognition in the course of the Rent Act review of the fact that within the London area there are some rent stress areas where the normal provisions of the Rent Acts do not adequately safeguard tenants.
I remind my right hon. Friend and tell the House of some of the examples. There are small properties which have been let until recently at £10 a week exclusive of rates—one room with a bathroom and a kitchen in Little Venice. Their rents are going up immediately to £30—a threefold increase.
A tenant who lives in moderate property came to see me last night. Previously, he paid £800 a year. He faces a rent increase proposal of £1,700 a year. It would have meant, under phasing, that he would have paid an additional £300 a year for each of the next three years. His immediate rent rise would have been from £800 to £1,100. He had the rent officer in to see the property. He fixed a rent of £1,525. The tenant assumed from that that he would be paying one-third of the increase in each year, which would have been £242 a year—in other words, his immediate increase would have been from £800 to £1,042— but, no. For the first time, there is a service element of £278 calculated in that registered rent, which applies immediately, and it is only the difference between that service element and the total increase which is phased over three years.
Although getting a reduction of £175 from the rent officer, that tenant will now be paying, because of that service element, not the £800 which he is paying now and not the £1,100 that he would have paid as the first instalment of a three-phase increase, but £1,227. His rent is jumping more than 50 per cent. at once, even under the phasing proposals.
I cannot accept that the Secretary of State and the Government can argue that the Rent Act is working satisfactorily when tenants face enormously excessive rent increases of that kind, and it does not make sense to try to explain to tenants how they can find this compatible with the current 10 per cent. pay policy, how they can find it compatible with the cumulative effect of pay policy over the past three years, or how this kind of increase can be justified even in relation to a cumulative rate of inflation over a three-year period. The experience in my constituency is that the £300, the £600 and the £900 increase over three years is far too common, and is not just the exception that can be quoted.
The problem now is that some of the biggest culprits in this situation are those from whom I hoped better, namely, the Church Commissioners. One would have assumed that they would have been less avaricious than some private landlords and that they would have had more regard to the social consequences and the break-up of the community as a result of increases of this kind, and would

not have gone for the maximum permitted under the law. But, sadly, if someone asks me what is the difference between Freshwaters and the Church Commissioners, I have to answer "About £15 a year". There is that marginal difference between the rents that the two will charge and the increases that they will demand.
I have been making representations to the Church Commissioners, many of whom are members of the Government. Among the ex officio Church Commissioners are the Prime Minister, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, the Home Secretary, the Attorney-General, the Solicitor-General and Mr. Speaker himself. I have made representations to them all. On a recent Friday, I asked each of them whether he would resign as a Church Commissioner because of his clear inability to apply any pressure over the rent levels being charged. With one exception, each of them explained that he was an ex officio Church Commissioner, as though that were the beginning and end of the whole matter. I had one little ray of hope, in that the Chancellor of the Exchequer said that he would reply to my question when he had considered the matter. Apparently, someone told him that he was an ex officio Church Commissioner, with the result that, 48 hours later, he gave me exactly the same reply as all the others.
What happens is that constituents and tenants say "Here are these Ministers, members of the Cabinet, who are Church Commissioners. Why are they standing to one side and allowing this to happen?". The truth is that there are about 100 Church Commissioners. My hon. Friend the Member for Kingswood (Mr. Walker), for his sins—perhaps that is an inappropriate expression in this context—is a Church Commissioner. The Archbishop of Canterbury is a Church Commissioner. I have been to Lambeth Palace to see him. It would be a marvellous place for squatters.
All the representations that I have made, all my pleas on behalf of tenants, have fallen on stony ground. What happens is that Church Commissioners, along with all the other private commercial landlords, put the blame back at the door of the Government and say "They are responsible for the Rent Acts. Therefore, they have responsibility for these increases."
I ask my right hon. Friend at least to say something that will reassure tenants that the Labour Government know about these special problems in these rent stress areas and that they intend to take some action.
Finally, I mention the possibility of the establishment of tenants' co-operatives. We find all the enthusiasm for selling off public housing stock on the Conservative Benches but less enthusiasm for the statutory right of the private tenant to buy from his landlord, especially on a co-operative basis. I gathered from the answer to a parliamentary Question which I tabled some time ago that the Government are thinking sympathetically in this direction.
It would at least offer a ray of hope to private tenants in my constituency and elsewhere if they could see the prospect of getting out of this rat race of rents, with landlords ranging from Freshwaters to the Church Commissioners fleecing them, and the opportunity of having some kind of democratic control of and accountability for the homes in which they live. I hope that my right hon. Friend will respond positively to that suggestion.

5.47 p.m.

Mr. David Penhaligon: It is interesting to note that this is one of the better attended debates that we have had for some time, and I suspect that that reflects the importance of housing in most of our constituencies and the sheer volume of people who come to see us about the difficulties which they are experiencing.
At least one reference has been made to the quality of housing in some rural areas, and I should like to take this opportunity to underline it. It is not so long ago that a constituent of mine came to one of my surgeries to explain his problem. It seemed to revolve round the fact that his Elsan, which was his modern sanitation, had a hole in the bottom of it. I remember asking him, with a wry smile on my face, how he managed. He replied "It's all right, I 'ad an ol' milk chum at 'ome and I 'acked the top off 'e." He did not seem desperately worried for himself, but his wife thought that there was a rare chance of there being an accident. I recollect

writing a letter to the landlord. My constituent got a new Elsan and, to an extent, that was one minor problem solved. My constituent was not expecting to be connected to modern sanitation; he was in some ways quite satisfied with the existing state of affairs. But for a while he could not even get for himself an Elsan without a hole in the bottom of it.
Rural housing looks picturesque, but in many ways it causes great difficulties, and I want to take the opportunity today to point out a specific problem which is peculiar to rural areas, especially tourist areas. Certainly it affects my constituency. I refer to what are known locally as "summer lets".
Summer lets are not second homes. When I first came to this House, I remember tabling a Question asking the Secretary of State for the Environment whether he was satisfied with the number of summer lets in Cornwall. The Department rang me up to ask me what a summer let was. I was asked "Do you mean a second home?" I replied "I do not mean a second home. I mean a summer let." It is property let by the week for a very high rent in a seaside resort which has a large tourist trade.
There is a great deal of money in this. It is not easy to find accommodation for four or five people in August in a resort such as Mevagissey. A great many people are prepared to sleep several to a room during their holidays in conditions that they would not be prepared to put up with during the rest of the year. A property in Mevagissey in August can fetch between £100 and £140 a week. There are many places where people are delighted to receive payment in cash—and we all know why.
One is made continuously aware of this trend. If one goes canvassing in my constituency and knocks at a door where someone lived whom one knew, one will often get no reply, but a neighbour will say "There is no point in going there now, Mr. Penhaligon. It is a summer let." There is no control over this situation. To pile insult on injury, these people even get domestic rate relief. I am not claiming that if that relief were abolished it would make all that much difference, but it is there.
The amount of property used for summer let purposes in my area is one of


the main causes of the housing difficulties there, yet such property is actually given domestic rate relief. There is simply no control. I have had a lot of correspondence with the Minister about it, but he merely says that it is up to the local authorities to act. I have written to the housing officers of my local authorities and they say that they have no power or control. It is true that if they give planning permission for new houses they have some control over the use of those houses, and they may specifically allocate a house for summer let purposes or they may not, but they have no control over property that was built many years ago.
My view is that before this property can be used for summer lets it should be subject to planning permission for such a purpose. Someone owns a house, and wishes to change it to a shop. In such a case he has to apply to the local authority for permission to make that change of use. Very often the local authority in my part of the country—I suspect that this is true of others—will turn the application down on the specific ground that it is not prepared to see a reduction in the local housing stock because it has a housing problem. I often applaud a local authority for taking that line. But the use of that self-same property, owned by the self-same person, can be changed for ever and a day, for summer lets, without any planning permission being required.
In my eyes, there is no difference between using a property for selling chocolate or children's plastic buckets or cabbages and selling property by the week in summer as accommodation. I must try to convey the sheer magnitude of the problem. I can think of one village in my constituency where over 25 per cent. of the property is used for summer lets. This type of letting is spreading like a cancer—that is what it is in areas like mine. It destroys the community. The town becomes a winter ghost town—no one lives there, no one is seen there. This cancer is gradually spreading from the more attractive areas into the villages. It is happening throughout the West Country and Cornwall in particular.
I shall listen with great interest to what the Minister says about this situation, about which we have corresponded over the years. The situation is not acceptable. There will never be a solution to the

housing problem in Cornwall if we allow the mass transfer of property from ordinary letting to summer let. There is no way in which my ordinary constituent who works in the clay industry, or worked until recently in the tin mines, can compete for properties used for this purpose. Rents in August in Mevagissey are, as I have said, between £100 an £140 a week, and the ordinary Cornishman cannot compete with that.
Now, to compound that great difficulty the hon. Member for Henley (Mr. Heseltine), speaking for the Conservative Opposition, today clearly stated that the Conservatives will give an inalienable right to anyone in my constituency or anyone else in tourist areas to buy council houses in which they live. If he gives council tenants the right to buy he also, quite rightly, gives them the right to sell to whomever they choose. In Portscatho there is a row of 20 houses overlooking the harbour. I cannot imagine my ordinary constituents being, able to compete in buying those properties. So there will be yet more people down from London and taking summer lets, occupying that important part of our community. I assure those who enjoy holidays in my part of the country that they will not be so keen then, because there will be no one left to make the beds in the morning or to man the shops or to clean the streets or to make the place pleasant, because there will be nowhere where ordinary Cornish people can live in these Cornish seaside resorts.

Mr. Tim Sainsbury: I assume that the hon. Gentleman wishes to continue the situation in which the only ordinary Cornish people who cannot let their homes when they themselves go on holiday are those who are unfortunate enough to live in council houses.

Mr. Penhaligon: I do not see the relevance of that intervention to what I am saying. I want properties that are to be permanently used as a business concern for summer let to be subject to planning permission. That is all I am asking for, and is all that I have ever asked for. In Cornwall, we are not talking about the odd property in a case where, say, the husband has been sent abroad for a time and decides to make sensible use of his property while the family is away. We are not talking about the sort of property which becomes vacant for a year


or so. The local council would clearly understand the background and would give permission for it to be occupied while the family was absent. We are talking about a real commercial enterprise in which there is real money, real profit and a real movement of property. I am talking of 25 per cent. or 30 per cent. of the properties in a town of 15,000 people.
If the Conservative Party gets its way and allows local authority properties in such areas to be too easily buyable by the tenants—the tenants are not fools, and will buy them because they will have a capital gain on their hands—in the long-term interests of the Cornish resorts and their communities, it will be nonsense. That is why I have always supported the argument that local authorities should have the right to decide whether council houses are to be sold. They are the ones that know the local situation. The Cornish local authority will know that the situation I have described will happen in Portscatho whereas if one sells the houses off in St. Austell it will not happen.
That is the logical way to make the decision. Each case should be looked at on its individual merit. It is for the local community to discuss the situation. There is no one in Cornwall who does not realise that, under this Conservative proposal, that is what will happen to the properties. People might desire that situation but no one in Cornwall does not recognise that that is what will happen.

Mr. David Mudd: I am trying to follow this new philosophy of Liberal control and I am amazed to find that my constituents who happen to live in Portreath or in Falmouth are, because they live in attractive seaside resorts, to have no rights as council tenants to purchase their own properties, whereas those who live in such places as St. Day are to have such rights. Are we really to create a subdivided community of council tenants, some with more rights than others, by the pure geography or the appeal of the area in which they happen to live?

Mr. Penhaligon: That is precisely what we are going to have to do if we wish to maintain these communities as living

communities, in which the people who have been born and brought up there are able to get properties they can afford to rent. I agree that it is a tragic and miserable choice, but I think that it is one that has to be made in Cornwall in the fairly near future.

Mr. Joseph Dean: Does not the hon. Gentleman think it peculiar that the Conservative Opposition talk only about forcing local authorities to put their houses up for sale but say nothing about the private landlords, although, if they are to be consistent in their argument, they should apply the same prescription to them?

Mr. Penhaligon: That would be quite a popular policy in parts of my constituency. It is true that if one does it for one side one ought to do it for the other side. It is local choice which is required, and local authorities should be given the power to make their own decision within their own area, after considerable local debate.
The point that I was making related to the control of summer lets. I know that that does not directly relate to the council house issue. I am now talking about the properties to which the hon. Member for Falmouth and Cambourne (Mr. Mudd) referred. What happens is that, for reasons which we all understand, properties become vacant and the landlord regains possession. But in Cornwall the last thing he ever does, if the property is anywhere near the sea, is to advertise it as being let for anyone else. Instead, it joins the enormous number of properties which are used for summer lets.
When it comes to deciding the way which Liberal Members will vote tonight, I shall be listening very carefully to what the Minister says on this point.

6.1 p.m.

Mr. Terry Walker: Being mindful of Mr. Speaker's ruling about the length of speeches, much of what I want to say will be about the practicalities of the situation relating to public sector housing. As for the private sector, suffice it to say that many of us are disappointed with what has been achieved over the last four years. It was rather hypocritical of the hon. Member for Henley (Mr. Heseltine) to condemn the


Government and in the same breath to say that the reason why the figures for 1973 were bad was the oil crisis. The situation that we inherited was something about which we had no idea when we talked about what we proposed in our manifesto.
I am sure that my right hon. Friend the Minister for Housing and Construction shares the frustration which I and others feel about the things that we have been able to achieve over the last four years, but the economic situation has made it very difficult for funds to be readily available for all the things which we believed were necessary as a result of the situation which we inherited. However, my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State gave some helpful and hopeful signs in his speech. I hope that the Home Purchase Assistance and Housing Corporation Guarantee Bill will help many first-time buyers to obtain a home more quickly than they otherwise would. I also hope that his suggestions about making grant aid for improvement work more readily available will reach fruition very quickly.
Over the past few years the main complaint which I have had from constituents with regard to local authority mortgage rates is that when building society rates have fallen they have found themselves paying a higher rate to the local authority. Some means of regularising the situation is necessary, because on the face of it this appears to be rather unfair.
In the public sector, the problem faced by smaller housing authorities, such as that in the Kingswood district, which has the same boundaries as the parliamentary constituency, has been more noticeable during the last 12 months. The effects of the reorganisation of local government has been felt. I suppose that has been the case for many local authorities throughout the country. In Kingswood, the building plans which came to fruition last year were those which were left over by the previous housing authority. That left us with housing units which had been planned by smaller authorities to fill a very different need. It is true that people on housing waiting list now have a broader choice of where to live, but often the flats and maisonettes planned by the previous authority were either situated in the wrong place or were not required by the people

on the combined waiting list of the new authority of Kingswood.
The districts where flats and maisonettes were provided have proved to be unpopular. Nevertheless, the district council has let over 400 of these properties. Some difficulty has been experienced, because many of the homes which were planned were for elderly people and were unsuitable for families, despite the fact that the majority of applications on the housing waiting list were from families. In order to accommodate those families I believe that in future we must concentrate on family units. I believe this is a problem which is similar to the problem of neighbouring authorities.
I understand that the Department of the Environment has approved new housing for the coming year, but that housing is mainly for the elderly. In Kingswood that is a cause for concern, because much of the land owned by the council is not in a suitable position for old people. That in itself will create a problem. Another problem is that those now on the waiting list, which is growing all the time, are young families who have to join the end of the queue. There seems to be a problem in that regard.
The Housing (Homeless Persons) Act was mentioned earlier. My impression is that it is an Act which enables quick and effective help to be given to many homeless people. I would not want it to be felt that any remarks I now make are against the Bill, because I am strongly in favour of it. I am sorry that the misrepresentation of facts about the Bill in remarks which have been made outside has made some people worried. Nevertheless, the Housing (Homeless Persons) Act, welcome though it is, has put pressure on local authorities to provide for people who find themselves homeless and has resulted in such people jumping the queue. That is a difficulty. Over the last six months, the Kingswood district has housed nine homeless families per month, on average, and only 11 families have come off the housing waiting list. There was also the odd special case, such as someone moving into the district for reasons of work, and so on.
That means that half the homes available were taken up as a result of the Housing (Homeless Persons) Act. I believe that the Act has made more remote


the chances of ordinary local people on the waiting list getting a home. I should like my right hon. Friend to say something about this, because resources need to be given to smaller local authorities such as Kingswood in order that they can avoid being faced with this kind of problem. It creates a difficulty when half the houses available to a smaller authority are allocated to families as a result of the Housing (Homeless Persons) Act.
I should like to mention briefly two other points. The modernisation programme is something which needs special attention. In my own area, many council houses were built 30 years ago, just after the war. They now need to be modernised as a matter of urgency. The policy of the council in accepting the lowest tender has not always resulted in the work being done in the best possible way. Perhaps there is a need to look at the policy of the Department of the Environment with regard to the problems of modernisation of properties.
There has been a growth of private housing associations in the Kingswood district. They perform a valuable function in providing homes to let, but there have been problems with high rents and heating costs in some of their properties. Many tenants have complained to me about condensation. The housing association said that the reason was lack of heating, but when the heating was turned on people faced bills of £120 per quarter. This often meant that they fell into rent arrears, were evicted, and had to be rehoused by the local authority. I hope that this trend does not grow. Housing associations are new in our area, but we have come to suspect them because of these difficulties.

Mr. Arthur Latham: I should like to address a question to my hon. Friend as a constituency Member but also wearing his other hat as the Second Church Estates Commissioner representing the Church Commissioners. Do the Church Commissioners have properties in the neighbourhood that he is describing? Are the private housing association rents comparable with those levied by the Church Commissioners, and are the associations obliged to charge a maximum rent, as, I understand, the Church Commissioners are not?

Mr. Walker: I think that I should be out of order in answering questions during a speech, but the answer is that there is no Church Commissioners' property in my constituency.
The Departments will have to consider relaxing the yardstick for many of these projects. In Kingswood, things like landscaping have been cut out to keep down the costs of new estates. Many of us want much more expenditure on housing. The attendance at this debate shows the importance of the subject. In the more tranquil economic times to which we look forward the Government should inject a large amount of capital into housing. That is where the future lies. Housing is the right of all our people, and we must ensure that everyone has a home to dwell in.

6.14 p.m.

Mr. Russell Fairgrieve: It is my intention, for which I trust I shall have the forbearance of the House, to try to put the purely Scottish Conservative viewpoint on the vital subject of housing. Before going into the nuts and bolts of what our housing policy should be, it is right to remember our overall objectives.
The first objective must be to ensure that all our people have homes of a certain minimum standard. In this the record is good, although we must not be complacent. In 1971, 14 per cent. of households in Scotland still did not have the use of hot water, a fixed bath and an inside toilet. Perhaps 160,000 houses are of sub-tolerable standard. I would remind the right hon. Member for Western Isles (Mr. Stewart), because of what he has just said about the Scottish housing position being worse than in the rest of the United Kingdom, of one or two facts.
The housing situation in Scotland is not worse than in the rest of the United Kingdom. In Scotland, by April 1971 the number of dwellings was larger than the number of households by 125,000. Scotland's homes are more modern than those elsewhere. Fifty per cent. of them were built after the war—a higher percentage than in any other EEC country except Germany and Holland and 5 per cent. more than in Britain as a whole. In comparison with 14 per cent. of Scottish households lacking the three basic


amenities. 18 per cent. lack them in England and Wales. We can therefore be proud of our record.
The implication is that we no longer need to concentrate resources on building houses simply to house people but should concentrate on building homes to rectify those deficiencies. That involves bringing sub-standard houses up to standard, particularly by the use of housing improvement grants and also building houses for specialist requirements such as those of the elderly and the disabled.
Our second objective must be to ensure that houses are available where the jobs are available. In part, this is a matter of ensuring that workers in one part of the country can move to another. This is a particular problem in Scotland because of our high proportion of public sector housing, sometimes at low rents.
In Scotland, 54 per cent. of our people live in public sector housing, compared with 29 per cent. in England. But that is not the only consideration. There is no point in replacing houses in Glasgow in the hope that industry will follow in their wake, only to find that industry cannot expand where it wants to do so because the labour force is too small and there are no houses for incoming workers.
The North-East is the most obvious example of how a lack of houses is holding back development and forcing prices sky high, although I recognise the contribution of the Scottish Special Housing Association, which is providing almost 5,000 of the 10,000 homes that it is estimated will be required over the next few years.
This is particularly apposite in the North-East of Scotland, where my constituency of Aberdeenshire, West lies and where we have had probably the biggest increase in the electorate in the United Kingdom since 1974—about 10,000 people in the new communities in my constituency at Bridge-of-Don, Dyce, the fastest-growing airport in Britain, and Bucksburn, where houses are now required in both the private and the public sectors. Naturally, we are glad of the expansion of employment, but that brings its housing problems.
The third objective is to ensure a balanced mixture of types of houses. This is necessary in part to give people a genuine choice, but it is more important than just that. Different types of housing tend to meet different needs. The

private rented sector caters for the young single person, moving away from home to find a job. The private housing sector appeals especially to young married couples who want to make an investment in their future and who might otherwise have to wait several years for a council house, perhaps living with their parents in the meanwhile.
Council housing will continue to be of value to those who cannot afford a home of their own, but even within the public sector we must have a mixture of types of house so that, for example the old widow is not left alone in a large house simply because nothing more suitable is available.
The fourth objective is to give people as much control as possible over their own houses. If they cannot even control the home in which they live, they have little real freedom. That is why we believe in home ownership and in tenants' participation in the management of estates.
While the first of these objectives has been substantially achieved, the others have not—largely as a result of Labour's desire to control the lives and votes of tenants in large, soulless council estates. So we have based our policies on two pivots—increasing home ownership and increasing the control of people over their own lives on their own estates.
We support home ownership because we believe that if people want to own their own homes they should be able to do so. All the evidence over the years shows that people want to own their own homes. In late 1965, an Opinion Research Centre survey found that 54 per cent. of Scots, given a choice, would prefer owner-occupation. In 1976 The Guardian reported that a survey for the NEDC building committee showed that nearly 80 per cent. of the younger age groups would ideally like to own their own homes.

Mr. John Lee: Does the hon. Member's solicitude for private ownership extend to the tenants of private landlords?

Mr. Fairgrieve: Yes, as I shall explain later. Only 15 per cent. of the people in the survey chose to be council tenants. Given that sort of evidence, the fact that owner-occupation in Scotland is only 34 per cent. is a matter of great concern.


It compares with 68 per cent. in Ireland, 56 per cent. in Luxembourg, 52 per cent. in Italy 48 per cent. in Denmark, 46 per cent. in France, 53 per cent. in Belgium and 53 per cent. in Great Britain as a whole.

The Under-Secretary of State for Scotland (Mr. Harry Ewing): In the surveys of which the hon. Member has spoken, it is not accurate to say that 80 per cent. of those who wanted to be home owners were saying that they would like to buy the house in which they resided. Nearly 70 per cent. said that they would like to buy someone else's council house, not their own. It is all right to talk about selling council houses, but when one asks the tenants in the houses if they want to buy the house in which they live the answer is invariably "No". Therefore, the solution to the problem is not as simple as the hon. Member presents it.

Mr. Fairgrieve: I am not saying it is simple. I shall come later to other surveys and to what the Minister responsible for housing in Scotland has said. Once a person owns his house, it is his property and the market is bound to loosen and become freer. There can then be no objection to buying and selling between people who own their own homes.
There are two other reasons why we believe in increasing home ownership. First, it helps to improve labour mobility between different parts of Scotland and the United Kingdom as a whole. Secondly, it gives people a stake in the community in which they live. This is of itself of value, but as a by-product it tends to discourage vandalism, which is a serious problem in Scotland. The incidence of vandalism is much lower on private estates than on public estates, because people have a vested interest in their properties.
Having been an elected member of a Scottish local authority for many years and for some years chairman of its housing committee, I remember those who came to us and asked why Scotland was so out of step with the rest of the United Kingdom and Europe over the proportion of State as against private housing. The answer is, of course, the predominance in Scotland of Labour-controlled local authorities.
One way to increase home ownership is to build more private sector houses. The only way to meet people's genuine aspirations is to give public authority tenants the right to buy the home in which they live.
The Scottish Minister concerned claimed:
There is no great demand from council tenants to buy their houses."—[Official Report, 17th May 1978; Vol. 950, c. 453.]
He cited the fact that in 1977 he received 406 applications to sell council houses and approved 350 leading to 59 sales. But that is not a realistic assessment. In 1973, 2,248 public sector houses were sold, including 708 local authority houses, 204 SSHA houses and 1,336 new town houses.
It is no good saying that people do not want to buy if the whole system is geared to discouraging them. For example circular SDD36 /1974 rescinded the previous circular of 1972 which gave local authorities a general consent to sell to sitting tenants. From then on, the Secretary of State's personal permission had to be obtained for each individual sale. What a job for the Secretary of State. That is hardly an encouragement. There would be quite a difference if mortgages were available readily. The hon. Member for Eton and Slough (Miss Lestor) discussed this and mentioned some difference in England which I am unable to accept or understand.
I suggest that local authorities should submit schemes for sales to the Secretary of State as they did for comprehensive schools. If a discount were given to take account of a certain number of years' rent, a very different picture would emerge. Rents could also be turned into more or less mortgage payments.
The hon. Member for Argyll (Mr. MacCormick) referred to two types of amenity. This is why we have asked for a tenants' charter and tenants' control. It amuses me to hear from the Liberals and the Scottish nationalists this talk of instant politics. We have heard one speech from the hon. Member for Truro (Mr. Penhaligon) which was concerned mainly with summer lets. Is the Cornish summer holiday letting situation basically the way in which to treat the British housing problem?
It should be emphasised that not one person on the housing waiting list would be adversely affected by the sale of council houses. There is no evidence to show that if people did not buy they would vacate their houses for someone else.

Mr. Ovenden: The hon. Member has referred on a number of occasions to people buying the houses in which they live. He must know that a lot of Conservative authorities south of the border do not exactly apply that rule. They tend to transfer tenants into other council accommodation so that they can buy that accommodation. This means that a lot of tenants who are waiting in high-rise blocks for a transfer to better accommodation cannot get that accommodation because it has been sold. That really gives the lie to the point that the hon. Member has made.

Mr. Fairgrieve: I am sorry, I cannot accept that. There is no evidence at all that if people did not buy their houses they would vacate them for somebody else. That is the point that I have made.
We who believe in a property-owning democracy believe that when a person owns this or that council house he is entitled to sell it, swap it, change it or do what he wants with it. That is what it is all about—giving people choice, individuality and a stake in their own property. We Conservatives are determined to do this.
Of course a large number of people will stay as council tenants, and it is vital that they be encouraged to form schemes by which they can participate in the management of their estates. That will encourage them to take some pride in their estate and give them a sense of belonging. Too often housing managers, however good, are far too hard-pressed to have all the interests of the tenants at heart. It is too easy for them to become remote and bureaucratic. Once things start to slip, the sense of pride in the community is lost. Furthermore, it is important that transfers and exchanges should be simple so that people can move to more appropriate flats as their families grow up.
A fair and balanced policy on these lines is more likely to meet the real aspirations of our people than any lopsided, bureaucratic, centralist emphasis on one type of housing. Housing is about

people, about life, about families, about the most cherished and personal values in life and our standard of living. My party in Scotland is determined to give our people real opportunities to achieve their aspirations in this field, and we believe that with our ideas and policies we are much better equipped to do this than the Labour Party can ever be with its doctrinaire approach to these human problems and hopes.

6.32 p.m.

Mr. Joseph Dean: I wish to refer to one facet of the housing problem which has not been mentioned so far in the debate. This problem has arisen because of the massive post-war building programme. More than 4 million council house units of various types have been built since the war. The overwhelming majority of these properties are of a good standard that the tenants value and most of the buildings are of a high standard. However, I wish to talk about the "twilight" houses which are already showing serious defects not only in construction but in the social problems which they create.
Whether Labour or Conservatives form the next Government, they will not be able to turn their back on some of the problems which we as a nation have created in building those housing units. I am not blaming any particular Government, because successive Governments have been guilty in this respect.
I am aware that once the building programme got under way the target was set at about 300,000 houses a year. However, in order to inflate that figure industrialised housing was brought in with ministerial encouragement. I was involved at a local level at that time and I was bitterly opposed to the introduction of such development. I did not see the logic of industrialised housing unless it was brought in to meet a specific shortage of building workers in a particular area. I saw no reason for such a massive programme of industrialised building. The programme involved 100,000 units of low, medium and high-rise development.
I could not see the logic of that policy when there was such a huge reservoir of unemployed building trade workers on which to draw—and that is still the case. Furthermore, except for one short period, there has always been an adequate


supply of building materials to top up the traditional house building programme. However, because of the pressures on local authorities and the way in which subsidies were offered for high density developments, those of us who were opposed to industrialised building lost the argument and it went ahead.
We have now reached a situation where in almost every city we see monolithic, concrete developments which are hideous to look at and which people do not want to continue to inhabit. I accuse the architects and planners of creating this position. I am referring to deck access type of accommodation. There is one such development in Leeds which is not in my constituency but in the area of my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State for the Home Department. I told my right hon. Friend that I intended to raise the matter in this debate, and he was delighted that I intended to mention these problems.
There is a similar development in Manchester, the Hulme 5 development, which has been featured on television. That development is undesirable and has created massive social problems. Nobody wants to live there. What has happened is that the social problems have been moved from slums at ground level to roadways in the sky. We install lifts in those developments and we regard that as progress.
These developments are monuments of shame to the architects who designed them and to the planning officers who accepted the briefs. I believe that this country will carry the stigma of those developments for a very long time and the cost has been so enormous that it is impossible to demolish them, although that is what should happen. Wherever plans for industrialised buildings were put in, the figure always came out 20 per cent. higher than for conventional buildings.
When I knew that this debate was scheduled to take place, I contacted the director of housing in Leeds—a large authority responsible for over 100,000 properties, varying in quality from very good buildings to undesirable ones. The director of housing said in his report to me:
Basically, like many other authorities in the mid-60s, we embarked on building programmes which relied heavily on industrialised building

methods, new forms of construction, high density schemes, either in low rise or multi-storey form, all with the intention of increasing the flow of new properties to meet the housing shortage. With the benefit of hindsight, one can now say that what we did was to sacrifice quality for quantity and we are now paying, in more sense than merely financial, for our involvement in these types of development which, might I stress, were all subject to the blessing of central government in the striving for the attainment of new building targets.
The bills in respect of the maintenance of these industrialised houses and flats are astronomical. The director refers to a development at Hunslet Grange, and a low-rise development of 1,500 houses industrially built, and gives a figure for remedial treatment for these and similar developments of £8 million, which is the cost to the Leeds housing revenue account. The housing investment programme at present contains no calculation of the amount of money required for remedial treatment. When authorities are battling with this type of problem, will the Minister in future policies take account of their position? Obviously, this problem will be with the nation for many years and will increase in proportion. Indeed, I believe that it will assume a larger proportion even than the renovation of older housing stock. The capital cost involved in these developments is huge by any standards.
I am trying to be brief in my remarks and, in line with the requirements of the Chair I shall rapidly draw my speech to a conclusion. Before I leave the subject of industrialised building, I wish to make clear that because other schemes are under way we should treat them with care. They should be given low priority in building terms unless there are reasons of geographical shortage of labour and materials. There is no question but that, pound for pound, traditional building in bricks and mortar—and there is an ample supply of labour and material to do this work—is better value and the house-building figures would improve substantially if the finance were made available.
Last week, the hon. Member for Northampton, South (Mr. Morris) introduced a Bill on direct labour under the Ten Minutes Rule. Having listened to his speech, I conclude that he is probably the most ill-informed and uninformed hon. Member on direct labour. I do not go along with those who think that direct labour is a panacea and the answer to


everything or that it should be given contracts on a plate, but in some of our cities which have large building departments working in competition with the private sector those departments have made an immense contribution to the 4 million houses that I referred to earlier.
I ask the Minister to ensure that the private sector is made to toe the line in future in the way that private firms tender for contracts. The answer to a Question that I tabled some time ago showed that the overwhelming number of contracts for building council houses are not subject to open tender. They are overwhelmingly issued on the basis of the selected tenderers procedure. Local authorities have three or four builders of repute which build for them and one of those firms usually gets the contract.
I hope that Conservative authorities will not behave stupidly because of political dogma and attempt to damage the successful direct labour organisations which are making an immense contribution in the building of good quality council housing, good quality public buildings and even schools.

6.42 p.m.

Mr. D. E. Thomas: In view of the shortage of time, I shall not comment on what has been said by other Members except to assure the hon. Member for Paddington (Mr. Latham) that I would support him strongly in moving to disestablish the Church of England.
I should like to concentrate on expenditure on housing within Wales and on the related issue of the expenditure being allocated to the Welsh Office for its housing needs. The Under-Secretary of State for Wales, the hon. Member for Rhondda (Mr. Jones), will be familiar with my quoting statistics of public expenditure on housing per head by country in the United Kingdom and the fact that for the last year Wales was still £10 per head lower in its housing expenditure than the average per capita expenditure in the United Kingdom.
My major complaint is that the Welsh Office, instead of accepting the responsibility for the under-allocation of resources to Wales from the Treasury, has been conducting a well-organised campaign in the past year to blame Welsh local authorities for the housing position in Wales by accusing them of under-spending.
In reality, if we do a calculation of the real housing needs of Wales in terms of the amount of expenditure, we see that for the current financial year local authority capital expenditure on housing is just over £100 million. But if we calculate on the basis of the Department of the Environment's own indicators—namely, the need for house building, the number of houses unfit for human habitation, the extent of homelessness and overcrowding, the need for council mortgages on pre-1919 houses and the number of inner city programmes and partnership areas, and if we apply those six indicators to Wales, the calculation indicates that Wales should have received about £175 million in the current financial year's allocation.
Wales received only 4·1 per cent. of the total housing allocation for England and Wales although it needs about 180,000 new houses over the next 10 years. Whenever Plaid Cymru Members criticise the Government on their housing record and produce targets for the number of new houses, either new buildings or rehabilitations, needed in Wales over the next 10 years, we are always told that this figure cannot be quantified. When we came up with a figure four years ago of 25,000 new houses a year being needed in Wales, I was told by the Secretary of State that it was an interesting proposition from the point of view of research but that it was the sort of problem that could not be quantified.
I put it to the Government that on our calculations we need 180,000 new houses over the next 10 years if we are to tackle our housing needs. At present, we have 8 per cent. of the total number of pre-1919 houses in England and Wales and about 100,000 unfit houses—despite the boasting of the Secretary of State in a Press release on 2nd June which accompanied the belated publication of the house condition survey. We still have the appalling statistics of our major county, Mid-Glamorgan, where 20 per cent. of the population do not have an indoor toilet, 18 per cent. do not have a fixed bath in the bathroom and 18·4 per cent. have no wash basin. That is the position in the county represented by the Under-Secretary.
Not only do we have a failure by the Welsh Office to predict its housing need, but we have a failure to allocate resources from the Treasury to meet that need.

The Under-Secretary of State for Wales (Mr. Alec Jones): Can the hon. Gentleman explain how the Welsh Office can be said to have failed to allocate sufficient money when there is clear evidence that for two consecutive years Wales has failed to spend the money made available to it? It is not the lack of funds which is the problem but the inability to build the houses to match those funds.

Mr. Thomas: I thought that the Under-Secretary would say that, and I was about to deal with that aspect. I shall do so now. It depends whether one takes the view that the Welsh Office housing division is a passive or aggressive department. If it is a passive department, the Under-Secretary, his ministerial colleagues and their civil servants sit back in Cardiff and wait for bids to land from Heaven—or, rather, from the 37 district councils. However, if, as my party suggests, there is a need for an aggressive drive in housing in Wales, we need an aggressive department which will take its programme to the housing authorities. We need an aggressive department which will get increases in the figures in the public expenditure White Papers for projected expenditure in Wales. No local authority will make bids when it is faced with public expenditure cuts in the total housing allocation from the Treasury in London to Wales.
Wales has 5·9 per cent. of the population of Great Britain, but we have never reached even 5 per cent. of British expenditure on housing in the present decade. The projections to 1980–81 indicate that there will be a decline in the total public housing expenditure in Britain as a whole and that Wales will receive a smaller share of the diminishing cake. By 1978–79 it will be reduced to about 80 per cent. of the 1974 level.
We have had a cut in the global allocation from the Treasury to the Welsh Office, and individual programmes within Wales have been more severely cut than in Britain. Local authority mortgage lending has been cut. The projections of the public expenditure White Paper indicate that local authority lending has been cut from £30·2 million to £3·8 million, a reduction of 87 per cent. Improvement grants have been reduced by 74 per cent. Expenditure on new council

housing has fallen from £61·8 million to £54·5 million over the decade. I am projecting from the present through to 1981.
There is a continual reduction in new building and in the allocations being made available for other housing provision. For that reason, the housing policy of the Welsh Office was, for once, adequately described by the Western Mail. If I can avoid it I never quote the Western Mail in our debates, but on 31st January the housing policy of the Welsh Office was described in a strong editorial as
A tumbledown policy for tumbledown homes.
A major feature article in the Western Mail enumerated the facts on housing deprivation in Wales and the failure of the Welsh Office to tackle that need.
We talk about a lack of finance from the Treasury to the Welsh Office for new building, but we must stress the lack of finance for housing improvement. As Wales has such a preponderance of older property, we might expect increased expenditure on housing improvement allocated to Welsh district councils. Gwynedd, into which falls most of my constituency, is the only county in England and Wales which, on a calculation based on indicators and needs, is found to need more than six times the expenditure on house improvement that has been allocated by the Welsh Office. It is run close by Mid-Glamorgan, in which, on the indicators, all the districts need more housing improvement expenditure than is allowed by the Welsh Office. The Cynon Valley, Merthyr Tydfil, Rhondda, Rhymey Valley and Taff Ely districts in the county need six times more than the expenditure provided by the Welsh Office. The same applies in the county of Clwyd. The district of Glyndwr, which falls within my constituency, and all the districts in Clwyd need more. Glyndwr appears on the indicators to need six times the expenditure that the Government have allowed.
The allocation being made centrally by the Treasury to the Welsh Office is inadequate, and the Welsh Office accuses the authorities of underspending. I referred at the beginning of my remarks to the propaganda campaign waged by the Welsh Office to try to persuade the public that it is not the Government Department that is short of resources and


that the local authorities are not spending their allocations. We have heard that again today from the Under-Secretary of State. What he does not tell us is why the underspend took place.
I shall not quote from the appalling document—it is one of the worst documents to emerge from even the Welsh Office—entitled "First Report of the Working Party on Housing Finance in Wales", but it suggests that the main reason for underspending was the heavy rainfall during 1976–77. However, the factor that caused the underspend was the telephone calls made from the hon. Gentleman's Department on 23rd July 1976 to every one of the 37 district councils in Wales telling them to stop everything, to stop all their programmes. It was a moratorium or a freeze on the total expenditure on housing in Wales. That is what caused the underspend.

Mr. Alec Jones: The hon. Gentleman should be careful with his choice of words. It is not true—he knows it—that the moratorium, which lasted for three weeks, asked any council in Wales to stop anything. All it did for a three-week period was to say to councils "Do not let any new contracts, but continue with all the building that is in mind." The hon. Gentleman also knows that the report to which he refers did not emanate from the Welsh Office. It was a report to the Welsh Office, and 50 per cent. of those who made it were members of local authorities in Wales.

Mr. Thomas: I still suspect that the Welsh Office had a working majority on the working party.
The hon. Gentleman says that the moratorium did not have the effect of preventing programmes from going ahead, but what housing authority can operate in an atmosphere in which in December 1974 the Under-Secretary of State's hon. Friend, the Member for Merthyr Tydfil (Mr. Rowlands), who is now Minister of State, Foreign and Commonwealth Office, spoke at the North Wales housing conference urging local authorities to spend, only to he followed by the stop-go housing policy of the Welsh Office? As a result of the cuts, it was impossible in July 1976 for district councils to plan properly.
I ask the Under-Secretary of State and the Secretary of State for the Environment to cease trying to put the blame on Welsh local authorities for the failure to allocate public expenditure to meet the deepening Welsh housing crisis and to accept the responsibility themselves.

6.57 p.m.

Mr. Bruce Douglas-Mann: I am sorry that the hon. Member for Henley (Mr. Heseltine) has had to leave the Chamber. I did my best to detain him. I did tell him that it was my intention to refer to some of the things that he said, or did not say.
When I heard that the Opposition had chosen to have a debate on housing I had every expectation that we would hear from them some of the things that they would do if they were returned to office after the General Election. We know one of the threats held over us. We know that we would have the hon. Member for Henley as Secretary of State for the Environment. That is had enough, but we still have no knowledge of what he would carry out as Conservative housing policy in the event of a Conservative Government.
We had instead a pathetic mixture of misleading populist rubbish from the Shadow Secretary of State. The hon. Gentleman said that Conservatives would release resources through council house sales. When we hear the Conservative Party talking about council house sales, they appear to be taking place in cloud-cuckoo-land, in which everyone wins from the transaction. It is true that the tenant will gain who has the opportunity of buying a publicly owned asset at 20 per cent. below the market price. We heard the hon. Gentleman talking of selling at £2,500. That would not be a 20 per cent discount but a 66 per cent. discount.

Mr. Sainsbury: If the hon. Gentleman had listened carefully to my hon. Friend the Member for Henley (Mr. Heseltine), he would appreciate that he said that if all the council houses in Britain fetched an average price of £2,500 there would be a total elimination of public sector debts in respect of those houses.

Mr. Ernest G. Perry: The hon. Member for Henley (Mr. Heseltine) did not say that. The hon. Member for Hove (Mr. Sainsbury) was asleep.

Mr. Deputy Speaker (Sir Meyer Galpern): Order. Hansard will tell us tomorrow exactly what was said.

Mr. Douglas-Mann: That is an average price of £2,500. The hon. Member for Hove (Mr. Sainsbury) has confirmed what I understood the hon. Member for Henley to say. I believe that the average mortgage is over £7,500. Clearly the hon. Member for Henley is talking about a 66 per cent. discount. It is clear that the person who buys a public asset at a substantial discount is able to make money if he sells it and that he at least makes a gain. But no one else gains.
The local authority is unlikely to gain. So far as I am aware, the only serious statistical analysis of the effects of selling council houses was prepared by the Leeds City Council. This was perceptively analysed in "Roof" for May 1977. Leeds City Council was able to show a very small gain by comparing the amount that it would receive from sales and offsetting it against the rents and subsidies that it would lose. But it was able to achieve that gain only by working on the assumption that rents would rise at 5 per cent. per annum over the life of a house whereas repairs were estimated to rise at 10 per cent. In practice, rents rose by an average of over 25 per cent. the following year. That was cooking the books in a manner which is characteristic of the fashion in which the Conservative Opposition presented their case. However, it is no basis upon which a housing policy for the country should be prepared.
The local authorities' gain would be even less if, as would almost certainly be the case, the only people who were prepared to lend on the scale required were the local authorities themselves. They would be transferring from one pocket to another, and the extent of the debt would be increased.
If the balance for local authorities is fine—though the evidence is compelling that local authorities would lose rather than gain from the sale of council houses—the Exchequer would lose at a tremendous rate. The Opposition pointed out, on the basis of first-year figures, that they can show that the cost of the subsidy to a mortgagee is less than the cost of the subsidy to a local authority tenant in a new house; but the subsidy

on a mortgage goes on for as long as the house exists. Each time that the house is sold in a period of inflation, the subsidy starts again at a new higher rate.
Council houses built 10 or 15 years ago are now showing profits to local authorities. If such a house were sold, there would be a subsidy on the mortgage, and when the house was sold again, on the basis of the rates at which house prices inflate—say, 30 per cent. over four years—the subsidy would start again 30 per cent. higher. On average, houses are sold once every seven years. Therefore, the subsidies from the Exchequer would be renewed repeatedly. Many people live in houses which were built in the nineteenth century and they are still being subsidised from the Exchequer through mortgage tax relief.
The Conservative Party's irresponsible and misleading proposal would impose on the Exchequer an endless and increasing burden. The proposal to sell council houses, far from providing financial rewards, would be financially disastrous.
Looking at the social effects, it is obvious that they would be even worse, in practice only the better-off tenants could hope to buy and only the better houses with gardens would be sold. Council tenants who could not afford to buy would be left cooped up in high-rise blocks and the poorer quality council accommodation. There would be a substantial reduction in the number of new lettings which could be made. Approximately three out of every five lettings are of houses which have been vacated. Even if those were the only houses to be sold, there would be no new lettings from transfers.
In my constituency I have had recent experience of a husband and wife and five daughters living in a GLC flat consisting of two bedrooms and a box-room. Four of the girls were in one small room. It had inadequate ventilation. Medical certificates were provided. The flat was damp, there were mice, and plaster was falling down. The family applied to the GLC for a transfer. A GLC official, in response to the application, wrote:
I very much regret that the position as far as houses are concerned has become more difficult in recent months because general properties are required to meet the Council's commitments under the 'Homesteading Scheme' and we are also required to set aside 50 per cent. of newly vacated estate houses for sale.


We do try to keep the larger ones for our tenants but four bedroomed estate houses are few and far between.
The Opposition would sell them all off and give a statutory right to tenants to compel reluctant authorities to sell such properties. The social effects of their policy—the only bit of policy that we heard today—would make our housing situation worse and the cost of meeting housing problems would be enormous. That was all that we heard from the hon. Member for Henley.
We did not hear what the Opposition would do about the Rent Acts. We constantly hear snide remarks by Conservative Members to the effect that the Rent Act 1974 dried up the supply of privately rented property. They are unable to produce any evidence to support that claim, because it does not exist.

Mr. Sainsbury: There are fewer properties to let.

Mr. Douglas-Mann: I agree with the hon. Member for Hove that there are probably fewer properties now being offered to let, though not many fewer. Indeed, if he reads technical volume III of the Green Paper, he will find that confirmed. There may be fewer properties offered to let at the high rents which would be demanded, because families are still living in that accommodation.
I appeared on a television programme recently. The manager of a pop group who was moving into London said that he was willing to pay £50 a week for a flat, but he could not find one anywhere. I am sure that he did find one, but it was probably more difficult than it used to be because families which would have been evicted to make room for him were still living in their homes, thanks to the 1974 Act. The hon. Member for Hornsey (Mr. Rossi) knows that very well. I accept that on occasions he has made clear in public that it would not be his intention to remove the security of tenure granted under the Rent Act. However, it is difficult to get him to say it in public now. I wish that he would.

Mr. Hugh Rossi: I shall say it. Wait for my speech.

Mr. Douglas-Mann: I shall listen to the hon. Gentleman with great interest. The Conservative Opposition always give the impression to those who do not look

carefully at the small print that they will sweep away the rotten Rent Act—except when they are talking to private tenants, of course. The Opposition have not given us an inkling of their policies. Perhaps the hon. Member for Hornsey will do that in his winding-up speech.
This debate has given my right hon. Friend the opportunity to announce a policy which I have been urging and anxious to see for a long time—a policy for an effective tenants' charter. The points made by my right hon. Friend which would be included in that charter were security of tenure, the right to carry out improvements, the right to improvement grants, the right to a tenancy agreement and the right to participate in and to have some influence over management. Those are rights of which council tenants have been deprived for too long. I hope that we shall be able to implement them in the near future.
I suggest that we should also include—this point was made by my hon. Friend the Member for Paddington (Mr. Latham)—the right of enfranchisement for private tenants of self-contained property. I also urge my right hon. Friend, in his review of the Rent Acts, to consider the need to review the definition of the scarcity factor in the assessment of rents.
We heard from the hon. Members for Truro (Mr. Penhaligon) and Aberdeen, West (Mr. Fairgrieve) about the impact which a large influx of people into an area can have on local housing conditions. That applies to central London and many other areas. The scarcity factor is by no means adequately taken into account by rent officers and rent assessment committees in offsetting the market rent assessed under the provisions of the Rent Act. There is an urgent need for that to be done.
I should like to see the elimination of abuses because of loopholes in the law. There is scope for abuse by both landlords and tenants. That problem needs to be put right.
The policies announced by my right hon. Friend, in contrast with the emptiness of the Opposition's proposals, make clear to anyone who has any concern about the standard and provision of housing for those in need and the provision of reasonably priced houses for those who wish to buy that it is very much in their interest


that we should retain a Labour Government in office.

7.10 p.m.

Mr. Tim Sainsbury: The hon. Member for Mitcham and Morden (Mr. Douglas-Mann) saw something in the Secretary of State's speech that I was unable to see—that is, a policy. I saw 45 minutes of platitudes. The Secretary of State excelled on his own Green Paper in terms of length without content. I was unable to detect any policy proposals, however.
I felt at moments that he exceeded even the answer that I received when I asked about the replacement of a much out-of-date circular on housing standards and costs for accommodation specifically designed for old people. I received the electrifying answer:
We intend soon to consult local authority associations".—[Official Report. 11th May 1978; Vol. 949 c. 616.]
I thought that today's speech was well up to the standard of his intention soon to consult, to bring forward, to review and to have under consideration. That approach is an excuse for a policy and a programme, and by it the Government have failed to deliver the sort of housing that people want.
As my hon. Friend the Member for Henley (Mr. Heseltine) pointed out, the objectives of housing policy should be to provide for people the opportunity to have, to live in, to buy or to rent the sort of homes they want while obtaining value for money for the massive expenditure in which the Government are involved. There are many ways of obtaining better value for money. One about which the Secretary of State was invited to comment but failed to do so was nationalisation of the building industry and getting direct labour organisations under some proper form of cost control and scrutiny. I did not hear much in the Secretary of State's speech on those important subjects.
I wish to confine my remarks to the first objective that my hon. Friend outlined, which is giving people the chance to live in the sort of homes they want. People who make the sort of speech that we heard from the hon. Member for Mitcham and Morden have no interest in providing the sort of home that fami-

lies want to live in. They can see only that the selling of council houses takes something away from the public sector. They totally ignore the point made by my hon. Friend the Member for Aberdeenshire, West (Mr. Fairgrieve) that the surveys show that people want to own their own homes, that people who live in council houses want to own their own homes and that newly married young couples setting out on family life want to own their own homes. They do not want to live in a council house, tied up with all the bureaucratic red tape and dependent on the council for repairs and approvals. When Labour Members speak of the sale of council houses, they show no appreciation of these facts.
On the basis of the statistics, it is at least arguable that there are far too many council houses, whichever way one looks at the matter. I refer particularly to the two- and three- bedroom accommodation in the council sector. We know that there is a crude housing surplus. There are nearly 500,000 more dwellings than householders. It is because there are other factors such as vacancies and second homes.
But we must bear in mind that there is an imbalance between the size of dwellings in the housing stock and the size of households. The imbalance is even more pronounced in the public sector. It is not easy to measure, but paragraph II.13 of technical volume part 1 of the housing policy Green Paper shows that in 1971, for which we had accurate figures, 61·2 per cent. of households were above the bedroom standard. Only 6 per cent. were below it. It shows that 22·1 per cent. of households were two or more bedrooms above the bedroom standard, and later evidence, such as it is, indicates that the disparity between the size of household and the size of dwellings in the housing stock has become even greater.
Paragraph 38 points out:
Although the totals for 1975 are rather uncertain since a firm…total of households is lacking, there is no doubt that there has been a considerable reduction since 1971 in the number of households that are short of space…there has been a further increase in the number of households with two or more spare rooms in terms of the bedroom standard".
This disparity is more pronounced in the public sector than in the private sector.


and yet councils, especially Labour-controlled councils, are still seeking to place all the emphasis on providing more and more two- and three-bedroom parlour and non-parlour houses, instead of directing their efforts, as the public sector should, at the areas where they are most needed, which is surely in providing accommodation for the elderly, especially accommodation with a warden and other special facilities, accommodation for the disabled and accommodation for single-person households. Those should be the priorities for the public sector.
I admit, and I think my hon. Friends will agree, that the private sector will not provide adequately in this area. It is abundantly clear, however, that the private sector can provide the family housing that the country needs, and it can do so far more efficiently than the public sector in terms of construction and maintenance.
We then come to the Rent Acts. They are carefully designed, reinforced and buttressed by the Government to deter anyone with spare accommodation from letting it off. In 1971 there were 1·5 million pensioners in one- or two-person households living in dwellings with five rooms or more. The general household survey of 1975 showed that 31 per cent. of one-person households lived in dwellings with two or more bedrooms.
The evidence, such as it is, shows that there is enormous potential for making use of under-occupied space, and yet we know—I certainly know from experience in my constituency—that, if someone has spare accommodation to let and seeks advice as to whether to let it, he will be told "Do not risk it." He will be told that if there is trouble with a tenant he will never be certain that he will get the tenant out, certainly not quickly and certainly not without a lot of cost. He will be told that if the tenant does not pay the rent he, the landlord, will stand no chance of getting the money back, and that if everything goes well the rent he will get will be kept down and he will be allowed to increase it only every third year—and even then there is no certainty. He will be faced only with discouragement.
Yet what did we have from the Secretary of State today? We had more platitudes about what might be done in the future. Did we hear about the review of

the Rent Act 1974? If the right hon. Gentleman really cared, surely we would by now have seen that.
The Government's housing policy has totally failed to provide the numbers and the right sort of accommodation. They have wasted the public's money, and, above all, they have failed to provide encouragement for the country's householders to make the best use of the housing stock that is available to the advantage of those who are seeking accommodation.

7.19 p.m.

Dr. Oonagh McDonald: This evening's debate has ranged widely over many of the aspects of the housing problem, but there is one matter to which I do not think attention has been drawn. I have not been here for the whole debate because, unfortunately, I had to be in attendance on the Finance Bill Standing Committee.
The subject which I am concerned about is gazumping. Governments of both major parties have regretted the existence of gazumping in the past but, regrettably, they have done very little about it. We now find that, as the housing market is becoming a seller's market, gazumping seems to be on the increase. I should like to give a particularly bad example from my constituency to support my contention.
A couple had arranged to buy a house from a building company. The company had completed the house last November. The company, P. T. Elimore Ltd., wrote to my constituents on 5th April accepting their £50 deposit as a sign of their intent to buy the property at a price of £16,925. The couple then received a letter on 19th May saying that the price of the house had been increased to £19,950—an increase of over £3,000 in a matter of a few weeks.
Obviously, it is a difficult problem for Governments to deal with, but part of the problem involves the length of time taken in actually completing the purchase and the fact that the price agreed between the buyer and seller when the property is under offer can be changed.
This is a problem which the Law Commission has considered twice—in a working paper in 1973 and again in the Law Commission's report in 1975. Having considered this matter, and having duly


expressed its regret at the practice of gazumping, it simply recommended that no change in the law should be made, that no legal effect should be given to subject-to-contract agreements and that no civil or criminal liability should be imposed on the person who withdraws from such an agreement.
This is in spite of the fact that for most ordinary people—I am surprised that the Conservative Party does not attend sufficiently to this kind of problem—buying a house is a very expensive proposition indeed. To have to pay surveyor's fees for one's own surveyor and then, perhaps, surveyor's fees for the building society, and possibly to have to pay some legal fees to one's solicitor, only to find that the purchase has fallen through, can leave a person a couple of hundred pounds worse off. It can mean that a person is not in a position to buy the house that he had in mind, and it means, of course, that he has less resources at his disposal to buy the next house that he considers as a possibility.
The problem is that the Law Commission, which, of course, involves those who command a monopoly in conveyancing—the solicitors—is far too complacent. The solicitors not only command a monopoly but are themselves a closed shop, and all their efforts seem to be directed not towards providing a better service to the public but towards preserving their own position in the housing market and making sure that fees for conveyancing continue to flow into their pockets and to subsidise—it is alleged—other aspects of their legal work.
The Law Commission was much too complacent. It had plenty of other examples from other countries, some very near to home, of much quicker processes for conveyancing. In Scotland, for example, the average length of a completion is a week to 10 days. It can sometimes be done even more quickly than that. In the United States, at least in some of the states, I understand that a purchase can be completed in even less than one week.
When one looks at what a solicitor actually does in the process of conveyancing—apart from charging high fees—one finds that much of his work must surely be a repetition of work that has

already been done. We have already heard that houses tend to be sold again, on average, within seven years Much of the information for which a solicitor looks must be the same information as was found by a previous solicitor when the house last changed hands.
The Law Commission did not really take seriously into account the possibility of speeding up the process of conveyancing. It did not really take into account the possibility of restricting and simplifying the way in which the solicitor got the relevant information together for completion of the contract. Nothing like that was done. Therefore, the evil of gazumping continues. Ordinary people, whom the Conservative Party particularly wants to be the people who buy their own houses—I certainly support that sort of freedom—suffer from the activities of the gazumper, and they suffer from the activities—or, rather, the inertia—of the legal profession, which is unwilling to change any of its ways and unwilling to find a speedier and more efficient method of house purchase in order to ensure that the possibility of altering the price before completion does not arise.
No doubt the Government, too, will have their part to play and ought to take more seriously the problem of gazumping. It is becoming widespread yet again. We suffered from it in 1972–73, the period of the last property boom, and now, as real incomes are beginning to rise and people are turning to house purchase, they are finding that once again they are bedevilled by this problem and that the resources for buying a new house can all too often be reduced or obliterated altogether when they find that yet again they have been gazumped.

Mr. Eyre: In mentioning the problems of gazumping, has the hon. Lady also borne in mind that people sometimes say that they are going on to buy houses and then withdraw, and that this leaves the vendor in a difficult position? What has she to say about that? How would she deal with that aspect of the problem?

Dr. McDonald: With other methods of setting about buying and selling a house—in Scotland, for example—obligations are imposed on both the buyer and the seller. The point is that the amount of time taken to complete the purchase must be reduced to prevent this


sort of situation. I think that that answers the hon. Gentleman's point.
This is an area that could be made much more efficient and much less costly to the would-be house purchaser. The Government should look again at this whole matter and should again press the Law Commission this time not only to look at it but to come up with a solution.

7.27 p.m.

Mr. Wyn Roberts: I shall not follow the hon. Member for Thurrock (Dr. McDonald) into the byways of gazumping, but I think that my hon. Friend the Member for Birmingham, Hall Green (Mr. Eyre) was right to point out to her that a very different situation obtains in a falling market for houses, in which case the owner of a house can be gazumped, as it were, in reverse.
I wish to speak about housing in Wales. I have every justification for doing so, as the situation there is particularly grim, largely because of our high preponderance of old housing stock. Of the many housing problems in Wales, the one that has been concerning us most over the last two years or so is the apparent and, indeed, almost incredible inability of local authorities to use moneys allocated to them for housing, with the result that there has been serious underspending in this area of vital need.
I refer to the inability of local authorities to spend as "apparent" because I do not believe that the Welsh Office is as innocent in this matter as it would have us think it is. It simply does not appear to be able adequately to monitor housing expenditure in Wales. That is the crux of the matter. Consequently, housing starts last year were lower than they have been in any year since 1959 and 30 per cent. below the Conservative peak of 1972, which is a damning indictment of a Government who, shortly after coming to office, stated that their immediate aim "must be to get a crash house building programme going."
Those were the words used by the Secretary of State for Wales in the Welsh Grand Committee on 8th May 1974, as reported at column 13 of Hansard. We are still waiting for that programme, and the prospects for this year are hardly better.
This underspending has occurred when housing in Wales is receiving far less priority than it requires. Shelter argues—I was surprised that the hon. Member for Merioneth (Mr. Thomas) did not credit Shelter with the authorship of this argument—that if the total funds for England and Wales had been allocated according to an index of housing needs, such as that used by the Department of the Environment, Wales should have had a far bigger allocation of money for house building, improvements and loans in 1978–79. Over the preceding three years our expenditure per head on housing was noticeably lower than expenditure per head in England or Scotland. The problem is that we cannot, apparently, spend the little that we have for housing.
To give the Government their due, they did establish a working party on housing finance to investigate underspending, and it has just produced its second report, which is rather more illuminating than the first. One of the first points made is that the Welsh Office
should notify each authority of its allocations as early as possible".
The report goes on to say:
They were not able to do this for 1977–78 until 23rd December 1976 and the position for 1978–79 was only marginally better.
I understand that the Under-Secretary of State for Wales is worried that there might be an underspend yet again this year. There was an underspend of £28 million—that is about one-quarter of the total budget—in 1976–77 "despite all evidence to the contrary", said the Under-Secretary of State on 1st June. I should like to know what that evidence to the contrary was, and how on earth the Government could have misinterpreted that evidence so badly. On top of that £28 million underspend in 1976–77, there was an underspend of £16 million in 1977–78 and, as I said, a further underspend is to be expected in 1978–79. Three consecutive years of underspending in an area of crying need really takes some explaining.
The Government blame the local authorities, and of course the local authorities blame the Government. Why should there be this continuing problem? The working party refers again and again to "slippage" in the housebuilding programme and to various ways of dealing with it, but one has to go to the individual housing authority to see what are


the causes of slippage. One major cause in a particular authority's case was the Government's ban on new starts in the summer of 1976. Another was cash flow problems encountered by contractors owing to delays and increased costs. Another cause of slippage was the delay in the granting of Welsh Office approval for schemes.
It is difficult not to suspect the Welsh Office of speaking with a forked tongue on this subject. I suspect, too, that the Secretary of State has been weeping crocodile tears over this underspending because, according to "The Government's Expenditure Plans, 1978–79 to 1981–82" Cmnd. 7049, Government expenditure on housing in Wales was scheduled to fall from a peak of £239 million in 1974–75, to £179 million in 1978–79. If one were being cynical, one would say that the fall was being engineered to the accompaniment of loud wailing from Ministers, such as one heard in the speech of the Under-Secretary of State to the National Housing and Town Planning Council at the Metropole Hotel, Llandrindod Wells on 1st June when he said:
I am very worried about the apparent inability of local authorities to spend the financial allocations given to them. John Morris is equally worried, particularly as he has to bear the brunt of the arguments with the Chief Secretary to the Treasury on the size of the provisions to be made for housing in Wales.
Is that worry genuine, I ask the Under-Secretary of State, or is it just smartalec talk?
The verdict of Mr. David Page, secretary of the Welsh housing associations committee, delivered in the Western Mail in January of this year is, I think, a fair one on the Government's housing record in Wales. He said:
There is no strategy. What policy there is has been ad hoc. Meanwhile a quarter of a million Welsh people are living in houses unfit for human habitation. If present policies are pursued this will still be the situation by the time we reach the next century.
The Government may point to the decline in the number of unfit houses—houses without one or more of the standard amenities and houses in disrepair—between the 1968 and 1976 Welsh house condition surveys. There was a decline from 32 per cent. to 18 per cent., which was a 14 per cent. decline over eight

years. The Government introduced a new category in the 1976 survey which reduced the number of unfit houses from 147,000 in 1973 to 100,000 in 1976. That large difference was out of line with expectations, and
it is hardly conceivable that 47,000 houses were either demolished or made fit in a three-year period.
Those words are from the survey itself.
Be that as it may, the previous Conservative Government's improvement grant policy undoubtedly contributed a great deal to what betterment there has been in housing conditions in Wales. In 1972, a record number of 27,855 improvement schemes were approved, and 31,586 schemes were approved the following year. But, alas, the present Government have failed abysmally to keep up with the pace that we set. The number of such schemes in 1976 was just on 7,000, and in 1977 it was 6,808—a fall of 78·5 per cent. since the Conservative peak of 1973. But I understand that the Government did increase the limit of eligible expense for improvement grants to private house owners last August, and they claim to have conducted a vigorous publicity campaign this spring, although I cannot say that I, personally, have been vividly aware of it.
Both the house condition survey and the Government point the finger of unfitness—somewhat unfairly in the way that it is stated and in view of the Rent Acts and the Government's poor record on improvement grants—at the private sector where, according to the Secretary of State,
97 per cent. of the problem lies".
That may be true, but I should not like the Secretary of State to run away with the idea that life is heavenly in the many mansions in the council estates in Wales, and those Welsh Members—alas I cannot see any here other than the Under-Secretary of State—who hold consultative sessions with their constituents will bear me out on this.
There may not be a high percentage of council houses that are unfit according to the Government's criteria, but there are many whose tenants say that their houses are uninhabitable because of damp and disrepair. This is the staple diet of complaints which most Members have to digest at surgery after surgery, and of course the councils are unable to


carry out their repairs because of the position with regard to the rate support grant.
Of our 100,000 unfit dwellings, representing 9·8 per cent. of our total housing stock, just under half are owner-occupied—47,500—while the remainder are largely privately rented.
Owner occupation is very high in Wales, especially in the Rhondda, and the need for a vigorous improvement grant policy is obvious. So, too, is the need to make unfit houses fit. Here again, the Government's record is very poor—824 were made fit last year, compared with more than 8,000 in 1971.
With regard to the privately rented sector, what is really needed is a cost covering rent policy such as I believe exists in West Germany. It is a rent which allows for a reasonable return on capital outlay to the owner and which allows him to carry out repairs and maintenance and to recover the cost. Where subsidy is necessary, it should take the form of a housing allowance to the tenant. In this area, I thought that today's statement by the Secretary of State was very disappointing.
There is plenty of demand for privately rented accommodation in the real world about us, even if there is little room for it in the philosophy of the Labour Party.
We in Wales want to get rid of our unsatisfactory housing as soon as possible. I believe that we can do it if we direct sufficient help to those who need it and can make use of it. Our problem has been that the help was not directed to those who could make use of it. Therefore, let the Government put new life into their house improvement policy. Not only would an active policy of improvement improve the housing stock. It would also improve the employment position in the construction industry.
Meanwhile, confronted with the problem of old housing stock, the Government have engineered a slump in the number of house starts, in the number of houses made fit, and in projected Government expenditure on housing in Wales. Their housing record is a mean and miserable one, and it is high time that it was rammed down their throats.

Mr. Alec Jones: The hon. Member said that this was a slump engineered by the Government. Can he explain why my

right hon. Friend the Secretary of State has told every local authority in Wales "You complete your practical programme for house building and repairs as submitted to us, and we will finance the whole of that programme"? I do not regard that as engineering a slump.

Mr. Roberts: I am sure that the Minister is aware of what I said earlier about planned Government expenditure on housing in Wales being due to fall. There is no doubt that the Welsh Office and its Ministers took steps to assist in engineering that fall. The fact is that the fall went further than they thought it would, and now they are busy trying to retrace their steps.

7.44 p.m.

Mr. Alexander W. Lyon: It has always seemed to me that housing was the one social problem that this country faced which could be remedied easily if the parties were willing to give it the kind of priority that it required.
It is difficult, perhaps, to overcome the problems of low-income families. It is difficult, perhaps, to overcome the problems of the disabled and the sick. It may, in present economic circumstances in the world, be difficult to overcome the problems of unemployment. To overcome the problems of housing, however, we need land, we need cash to finance the building or the improvement of houses, and we need a building industry which is capable of responding to the demands made of it.
The building industry at present is clearly under-employed and under-utilised. The land is there, depending upon the policy of the Government in making that land available and the willingness or otherwise of owners to bring it forward. The money is almost entirely a matter of Government policy. It seems to me that that really indicates a very high responsibility on the Government to engineer a position in which everyone lives in a decent home.
This debate is taking place in a much less controversial atmosphere than it would have done in 1951. We are discussing the subject in circumstances in which over the last two years there have been reductions in the amount of money allocated to housing in successive public expenditure cuts, which shows that the


priority given to housing in Government policy generally—it applies equally to the Conservative Party—has fallen as against other areas of social spending.
If we decided that we would crack this problem, we are now nearing a position where it could be cracked. We have reached a position of crude surplus. It is true that the crude surplus does not indicate that the problems are ending, but it indicates that we are getting near to that position. The reason why this issue is now so much less controversial than it used to be is that we have got near to that position.
There are now more houses—it is true that they are not always well spread and it is true that they are not always adequate—than householders. The result is that we have come near to a position in which we can engineer the resources in such a way that they go to fill the gaps rather than toiling, as we were in the early 1950s and 1960s, to meet the absolute need for houses. As my hon. Friend the Member for Leeds, West (Mr. Dean) said, that had repercussions on the kinds of houses that were built and on the quality of houses which we are suffering from now and shall continue to suffer from in the future.
We ought now to consider seriously whether it is not right to allocate more of the gross national product and more of the resources in terms of the building industry and of labour to solving this problem once and for all, because it is capable of being solved.
Not only do we have a crude balance of housing. It is clear that, in the period between the 1971 census returns and the latest household survey, the quality of housing has improved immeasurably and that the number of houses which lack basic amenities has fallen considerably. Therefore, there is not only a crude surplus but better housing is available for our people.
If there is still a problem of housing, it is in specific geographic areas and in relation to specific kinds of demand in the country as a whole and it calls for a degree of sophistication in allocating resources. We have only just begun to tackle this.
I want to stress the importance of the new technique of the housing investment

programme and what that means in allocating resources to the real areas of need, geographic and otherwise. What happened in the past was that subsidies were given by the Government on the basis of the local authority recouping money from the Government when it decided that it would build or improve. The housing investment programme now means that some kind of calculated judgment has to be made by the central Government about how to divide the cake between different local authorities. The first year's trial was obviously crude and to some extent was not entirely happy. A number of authorities thought that they were entitled to a good deal more than they got. There were some who got more than they asked for. The upshot of the exercise has been that everyone recognises that we need more sophistication in the way in which the investment programme is ordered and the way in which the allocation is made.
I listened with interest to what the Secretary of State said about the statement made by the Association of Metropolitan Authorities, and I am glad that it was repudiated. It is absurd to suggest that this new technique is a regression. It is seeking to make sure that the resources go to the right place, to the right kinds of housing and to the right developments in housing in a given local authority area. If we did not have it, the prospect of solving the housing problem would be even worse.
My point is that the sophistication ought to be increased. What the present housing strategy proposals do for a local authority is to outline the nature of its stock, the quality and the proposals for increasing or improving the stock. It is all an indication of information about the physical reality of the housing in a local authority area. But that is not necessarily what dictates the housing demand. Merely to know that there is a four-bedroom house available is not an indication that Mr. and Mrs. Bloggs, or Miss Bloggs or Master Bloggs, want that kind of house. The needs are sometimes dictated by requirements which are not capable of being assessed by the information which is available to the Government from censuses or that kind of enumeration.
What we need is some indication of what people want and how that is related


to the housing stock in their area. I do not suggest that it is the only way of doing it, but the basis must be the housing waiting list. If people are waiting for a council house, this indicates that they at least have the view that they want to go into council accommodation. It may be that their need is paramount; it may be that their wishes are not urgent; it may be that they will be willing to wait a few years rather than take the first offer that comes. But it is an indication of the general requirements in that area.
The real difficulty, as I see it, of the housing investment programme as it is at present geared is that this kind of information is not fed into the totals and proposals of the local authority to the Government, and, therefore, the Government cannot take account of that kind of subjective need in the areas to which they are allocating. If one does not do that, I do not see how one can make a sensible allocation of resources.
To do it, one will have to act on criteria which are objective, and to be objective they must apply to every local authority area. To do that, the housing waiting list must be assessed by the same objective criteria in each area. That is not to say, of course, that the local authority needs to allocate its houses according to the waiting list in any way other than that by which it has decided by its own policy. But the way in which it assesses the need ought to be the same in every local authority area. Otherwise, to say that in York there is a waiting list of 1,000 whereas in Wandsworth there is a list of 16,000 is not to compare like with like.
The real difficulty is that at the moment that kind of uniformity does not exist. For instance, in York one cannot go on to the housing waiting list unless one lives in the city and has been there for six months. One cannot stay on the housing waiting list if one moves over the border to find a place in which to wait; one is immediately taken off the list. A married couple cannot go on to the list unless the wife is pregnant. It is not enough simply to be a married couple hoping to get a council house before starting a family.
That kind of restriction is not unique to York, but it is rare in the country as a whole. Perhaps the most alarming feature of our waiting list is that, if one refuses

once, one goes to the bottom of the list. If that situation were applied in some of the London boroughs, there would be a howl of horror because in those places people can go on refusing for quite a long time until they get the house they want. It is not so in York. There, one takes the house that the director of housing offers, or one gets nothing and goes back to the bottom of the list.
I make no particular complaint here about my own local authority, because I make it in York, but it indicates the nature of the difference between one housing list and another. If the Government, looking at the information available, do not compare like with like, there is a real sense of injustice when one area gets more money than it seems it should get when balanced against the need of another area.
Therefore, I suggest that, contrary to the statement of the AMA, the Government should be pressing the local authorities to have comparable standards for the waiting lists, leaving it to them to decide how they will allocate their own stock. That is the next stage. I do not regard it as taking over local authority autonomy, because it is available only in order that the Government can exercise their responsibilities better and, in that sense, in a fairer way to the local authorities concerned. The local authority can still have the power of deciding to whom it shall allocate its stock, and that is its proper role. If we do that, we shall be a great deal nearer to eliminating this social problem, so that we can turn our attention more effectively to other poblems.

7.56 p.m.

Mr. Charles Irving: I want to concentrate on the appalling situation of the single homeless person. The matter has been referred to hardly at all during the debate. The agencies dealing with this problem believe that it is now greater than at any time since the First World War. A decade or so ago, a high proportion of the single homeless were homeless men, many of whom passed through a revolving door involving prison, psychiatric hospitals, Salvation Army hostels, night shelters, sleeping rough and then back to prison, for the cycle to begin again.
Today, this hard core of homeless men has been joined by many people who have become homeless for many other reasons,


including reasons connected with the present economic situation. With 1½ million unemployed, it is inevitable that some of these will have lost their accommodation through difficulties in keeping up with the rent. Moreover, the tendency of many single people in a time of high unemployment is to move around in search of work, using hostels or cheap lodging-house rooms. A number of these men and women have joined the ranks of the single homeless and more seem likely to do so in the future.
The position has been worsened over the past 10 years by the very rapid decrease in the amount of cheap single-person accommodation available. Before the Second World War, there were over 300 reception centres throughout the country where a homeless person could obtain a bed for the night. Today, there are 21 reception centres, and in any event many single homeless people avoid using them because of the nature of the accommodation.
Cheap commercial lodging-house accommodation has been reduced tremendously. City centre redevelopment schemes and the building of inner city ring roads have led to the knocking down of many dwellings where landladies would take in a number of men for a few shillings a night. The Rowton Houses, which used to provide cheap, clean rooms for thousands of single people, have been upgraded into hotels to met the demands of the tourist industry. In London alone, this has led to the disappearance of about 2,000 cheap rooms.
As a result, a great deal has been left to voluntary organisations. I cannot mention them without referring to the Salvation Army, which provides about 6,000 beds nationally, and the Church Army, which provides another 2,000. But many homeless people try to avoid using such provision, being understandably reluctant to spend the night in a vast dormitory in the company of coughing, spluttering, alcoholic older men.
Apart from the Salvation Army and the Church Army, most help by voluntary organisations is of a specialist nature, aimed at specific sections of the homeless population. For example, I am pleased to be associated, though the

National Association for the Care and Rehabilitation of Offenders and the Stonham Housing Association, with the aftercare hostel movement for ex-offenders. I would also like to commend the excellent work of the Lifeline organisation, in the provision of accommodation for women and girls who are pregnant and in difficulties.
The problem of homeless young people remains every bit as serious today as it was in 1975, at the time of Yorkshire Television's brilliant documentary "Johnny go home". Teenagers leaving school have faced increased employment problems and many have left home for the big cities. For instance, in one year, Centrepoint, an agency providing temporary accommodation in the centre of London, gave shelter to nearly 6,000 youngsters and even then had to turn away over 2,000. More young people are sleeping rough, and many later join squats as the only form of accommodation they can find which they can afford, which results in physical and moral dangers.
There has also been a sharp increase in the proportion of girls in this group. The agencies working with homeless girls find that most of them have run away from home or, alternatively, have left home to find work or accommodation and have failed to find either. Runaway girls often say that they have been thrown out by their parents, but on investigation it often turns out that reasons such as pregnancy, family disruption, a new stepfather or stepmother with whom the young person does not get on, or a resistance to discipline by parents have led to the young person running away from home rather than being thrown out.
In 1976, the DHSS established an interdepartmental working party, which reported in July 1976. Its recommendations included an increased provision of hostel and other accommodation for homeless young people; local co-ordination of services to achieve concerted action for the homeless; the establishment of information services and youth advisory centres, and an adjustment of public expenditure priorities within existing resources to accommodate the requirements. Those recommendations are, if anything, even more urgent today than they were two years ago, and I should like to see very much speedier progress


with regard to the recommendations of that interdepartmental working party.
Several hon. Members referred to local authorities. Few local authorities maintain waiting lists for single people and sources of information on the single homeless are, therefore, varied and fragmented. Such information, however, suggests that the scale of the single homeless is far greater than is generally acknowledged, especially for those estranged from their families and at risk in one form or another. For example, a spot check earlier in the year in a youth club in Slough revealed that of the 70 youngsters present, 23 had nowhere to sleep that night. The period of homelessness varied between three weeks and five years. This is really an appalling situation.
Housing associations are particularly well suited to provide hostels and similar accommodation and, indeed, social support along with the accommodation, yet the Housing Corporation has earmarked only 5 per cent. of its total budget for this type of housing for 1978–79. I very much hope that it will reconsider the serious position that exists and substantially increase that amount for 1979–80. Local authorities should also be persuaded to contribute in this area, through their housing investment programmes. Single people have just as much right to a roof over their heads as have a family.
Finally, I draw the attention of the Minister to the fact that sheltered housing schemes under warden control, and residential homes for the elderly are, as he will know, bursting at the seams, with residents becoming increasingly frail and needy and requiring more care and attention. Unless a way can be found to finance additional care, local authorities will begin to waver at providing this invaluable type of accommodation.
In view of the national shortage of geriatric beds, I should like to feel that the Minister will ensure that close discussions are held with the parties concerned in order to develop such schemes, because I believe that the sheltered housing schemes, which could provide additional care and aid for the residents, are probably one of the most humane and dignified ways in which we can accommodate elderly people.

8.7 p.m.

Mr. John Sever: The main reason which prompted me to join the Labour Party, while I was still a schoolboy, centered around my view of the housing situation in Birmingham. At that time, capitalism's unacceptable face was in evidence everywhere. We had urban squalor, housing overcrowding, slums, condemned notices stuck on to rows of miserable streets which were long overdue for the bulldozer, Rachmanism, and little immediate hope for those in greatest need living in the courtyards and alleyways of our central areas.
The philosophy of the Labour Party was, and fortunately remains, that it should demand, and when in office work for, the provision of a home for every family provided by either the public or private sectors at a cost which could reasonably be afforded. During my maiden speech to the House, I made considerable reference to the problems confronting many of my constituents, with particular regard to housing and environmental matters. It is on those subjects that I have attempted to show a particular interest in my work in this place.
Within the Ladywood constituency—indeed, within the Ladywood ward itself—I have a situation where to the best of my knowledge no families are living in owner-occupation. There are all, save for a very small number who are tenants of private landlords, within accommodation owned by the local authority. That area was selected by the city council, along with four others, to be one of Birmingham's original post-war redevelopment areas. That redevelopment is now virtually complete. Only the unknowing or the ill-advised would disagree that as a result of that development my city remedied some of the poorest housing conditions in Britain.
In so doing, it was of the utmost importance to provide a great volume of municipal housing, and, in accord with the fashion of the times, large, impersonal high-rise flatted developments were under taken. In some neighbourhoods, the densities of habitable rooms to the acre were from 100 to 150, and even 200-plus in one extreme case.
Now, 20 years later, local social workers, housing officers, councillors, the present hon. Member for Birmingham, Lady-wood and previous Members of Parliament have concluded that that situation should be improved upon and that the situation of people living in that sort of density is unacceptable. In the light of our experience, some of those schemes now seem in some respects to have been ill advised.
Modern thinking leads many, including Ministers, to the conclusion that a density of about 60 habitable rooms to the acre is now the level that we should aim for. Birmingham and other authorities are being encouraged to develop housing at that density.
From those, including myself, who live in the inner city areas, there is a demand for environmental improvements, which will be undertaken only with great difficulty. For example, given that too many people live in too small an area, the need for open space, leisure facilities, sport and recreation is apparent. But the overriding difficulty is that no development space is available for these provisions, save in what now, in modern times, are regarded as small infill sites.
Local tenants' groups such as those in my constituency feel frustrated—justifiably—about the demands for improvements made upon them by local residents when at the same time all the land which would have been available has been used up and little is left on which the sort of environmental and leisure facility improvements which are demanded can be situated. Therefore, those municipal tenants seek tranfers to more satisfactory housing, which, paradoxically, often means properties far older than those they seek to leave.
The attraction of these older, often pre-war, houses is that they have gardens back and front in which their children can play, generally lower rents which they can more readily afford and a neighbourhood which will probably have a better allocation of open space and parks. The hopes and dreams of families desperately waiting to transfer to such housing are being dashed against the rocks of despair by the present, though temporary, Tory administration in Birmingham, through its policy of selling off the very properties to which these people seek to transfer.
Every corporation-owned house sold means that those waiting on the application lists for a first home have a longer wait, particularly if they are looking for a house, and that those on the transfer list living in high-rise developments will have to wait longer for a home of their choice.
I welcome the modifications made by my right hon. Friend to the structure plan. The plans were drawn up after considerable investigation in the various metropolitan areas. Birmingham's was the result of a lengthy process, which produced a worthwhile plan. My right hon. Friend has amended it, first, to show that the city should specify the general location of the major areas for residential development. That is long overdue, but the snag is that in the past two or three years the 20-acre sites referred to in structure plans have virtually dried up. The city has few such sites for development and most of the areas available when the list was compiled have now gone. I ask Ministers to look again at the problems of big cities in relation to available sites.
Secondly, my right hon. Friend has said that a policy related to the incorporation of housing in city centres should be considered favourably. That is obviously in line with the general proposal that life should come back to the centres of the big cities. Where it exists, very often the lack of leisure facilities and other amenities also exists. If we are to bring life back to city centres, we shall have to provide not only the housing but the general environmental facilities.
Birmingham's structure plan calls for the provision of about 38,000 dwellings in the area of the former county borough of Birmingham in the period 1971–81. The city is falling slowly behind that figure. With the details so far known, I suspect that the years 1981–86, which are the remaining years covered by he structure plan, will not see the development of the balance—8,000 or 10,000 houses—for which the plan called.
It is likely that the city will shortly be blessed again with a Labour administration, who will of course step up the housing programme. In the interests of those languishing on the housing lists now—who, to the best of my information, now number 11,500 for applications and 29,000 for transfers—who will obviously see their opportunity come


along, I therefore welcome the observations in paragraph 12.2 of the Secretary of State's submission to the Secretary of the West Midlands County Council. It refers particularly to the exchange arrangements which should be available in the area covered by the county plan. The Secretary of State says:
Structure plans should allow scope for the provision of a range of house types and tenures taking full account of the contribution that can be made by the voluntary housing movement. The policy on densities should help to ensure that the Plan has the necessary flexibility. The Secretary of State further agrees with the Panel that housing management measures could help to reduce the housing problems in the Six Plans area by minimising under occupation and by such measures as improved exchange arrangements for tenants in public sector housing both within and between housing authorities. But these are not strategic land use matters requiring his approval in the individual structure plans.
Therefore, there will be considerable local flexibility in the administration of exchanges and transfers. It is to that end that many people look to local authorities like Birmingham to do something for their particularly difficult housing cases.
Environment and Housing Ministers have greatly assisted those in Ladywood and similar inner city areas by calling upon housing authorities to produce submissions for the housing investment programmes. Birmingham's submission says that 100,000 dwellings—almost 30 per cent. of the stock—were built before the First World War and that there are now 50,000 substandard dwellings. It is to these matters that I am sure Ministers will give attention when considering the housing investment programmes for the big cities.
I think that Ministers have realised the importance of extending the consumer demand in housing and, I hope, will adopt a flexible approach, offering public and private tenants the widest possible choice of options in home provision.
Paragraph 12.1 of the housing Green Paper says:
There are quite large numbers of people who may face special difficulties in getting suitable housing. They include lower income households, homeless people, one parent families, battered women, the physically disabled, the mentally ill and mentally handicapped, old people, single people, mobile workers, ethnic minorities. In the last analysis, the effectiveness of any national housing policy and local housing strategy is likely to be judged by how

far it helps those facing the most pressing housing problems.
I am confident that this Government will continue to bear in mind those observations when they formulate a future housing policy. In so doing they will maintain the confidence and support not only of my right hon. and hon. Friends but of the British people.

8.21 p.m.

Mr. W. Benyon: I declare my interest as the owner of unfurnished rented property. I am sorry that the hon. Member for York (Mr. Lyon) has left the Chamber. He said that this problem could be cracked. I agree with him, but the tragedy is that it could be cracked so much more quickly if we had a bipartisan policy on housing. However, after eight years in this place I have given up all hope of that.
I begin by taking up the statement by the Association of Metropolitan Authorities which was so savaged by the Secretary of State. There are two very relevant points in that statement. The first is that Government approvals of improvements are roughly half those on new buildings. On the second, I quote from a report in today's edition of The Times:
If we are to get the housing programme moving again, local authorities must have the ability to plan for four years ahead, and have the freedom to determine their spending priorities within overall totals set by central government.
I do not believe that we shall get any further with the Labour Party on this issue. Therefore, I say to my own Front Bench that this must be our first priority when we take office. We must cut through the bureaucracy and red tape that at present surround the consideration of housing programmes by the Department of the Environment.

Mr. William Molloy: rose—

Mr. Benyon: No, I will not give way. Perhaps if we had more co-operation from the other side of the House I would, but I cannot do so because we have too little time.
The yardstick and the application of it are the central point of the argument. I deal with two local authorities and one development corporation. The development corporation deals with roughly 2 per cent. of the entire local authority


housing programme for the current year. It is the biggest in the country. The excellent officials in these 3 authorities run backwards and forwards to the Department ironing out details which it should not have to deal with at all. If these councils were given a set allocation and it was then monitored afterwards, the situation would be much quicker, easier and more efficient.
Now the Housing Corporation is getting in on the act as well. This corporation was envisaged as an organisation to control the voluntary housing movement. It was thought that it would operate on a shoestring to match the voluntary effort of the movement. It has now become a mirror image of the Department of the Environment. The voluntary housing movement has to go through two stages. It has to go to the Housing Corporation and then, in addition, it must go through the bureaucracy of the Department of the Environment. Therefore, it seems that the sole object of too many people who do not build one single house is to stop other people building them. At one point 18 months ago when the new scheme was started, I really thought that the Minister had got the message, but it seems that he is a prisoner of his own Department and the Treasury.
One can imagine the conversation going on at the Department with officials saying "Minister, you cannot do this, you cannot cut the yardstick because new building will drop away entirely and the Tories will be after you." That was why I was so sorry to hear my hon. Friend the Member for Henley (Mr. Heseltine) playing the numbers game this afternoon. The fact is that very few statistics in housing are of any use at all. The only ones that are of any possible use are the improvement statistics. But all the easy rehabilitation has been done and only the difficult bits remain to be done now. So, naturally, the figures will go down because of that.
When we have 20 million homes and 18 million families and, therefore, we are in crude surplus, the problem is becoming more and more localised and specialised. The statistics do not show this. The hon. Member for Birmingham, Ladywood (Mr. Sever) has just been talking about his problems. They are totally different from mine, which are in a very large new town. That is why it is so necessary to give local

authorities far greater freedom of action. They have the specialised staffs and the knowledge of the local area and, hopefully, they are responsive to local opinion.
On the sale of council houses, I listened very closely to my hon. Friend the Member for Henley. Nobody wants to see houses sold to tenants more than I do, if those tenants want to buy them. But I cannot contemplate or support this being done on a statutory basis. There seems very little difference between statutory comprehensive education being imposed by the Labour Party and the statutory sale of council houses being imposed by this side of the House. I am all for the greatest amount of inducement being given to councils to sell and to tenants to buy, but let us leave it at that. One can only hope that the example set by the more enlightened councils will be seen by the electors of the more bigoted councils. They will be green with envy and will take the appropriate action.
I turn to the private rented sector. I was most depressed to hear what the Secretary of State said about the review of the Rent Acts. This must be as a result of evidence given to the review by the Labour Party. It really makes most depressing reading. This review is not really necessary, because we all know what is wrong. We all know that the private rented sector is very unattractive and that there is no encouragement to let property except at the very top of the market.
There are two reasons why it is unattractive. The first is the unlimited security of tenure that is now granted, and the second is that the return given by fair rents is too low in relation to the investment value of the property. Therefore, as soon as the property becomes vacant most owners sell.
The Secretary of State and his Ministers are the only people in Britain who, at a stroke, could bring over 1 million more units on to the market today by agreeing to proposals for short-term tenancies. That one thing, done by the Labour Government—we would not get the same response if we did it—overnight would bring over 1 million units on to the private rented market and would help to solve the bad position in our large cities.
Secondly, it is very necessary in these inflationary times to move towards a


more frequent review of fair rents, and to ensure that the return is brought nearer to the investment return.
I shall not bore the House with my ideas about registration of landlords but it appears that the Press has now been told in three different ways. First, there is the housing association aspect in which registration has been demanded. Then there are housing improvement grants, under which the landlord has, in effect, to register, and there is the Rent Act, itself under which cases must go before a rent officer and the tribunal. This process could be extended to include registration of landlords with local authorities so that they could be afforded special conditions and thereby extend the availability of rented property.
Municipalisation has failed. I shall not quote what was said in the Labour Party evidence to the review body, but that policy can succeed only by confiscation. I do not believe that even the Labour Party would opt for such a policy.
It is not a bad rule to go for what people want. The vast majority of people want to own their own homes and must be given that chance. The rest need choice and availability. At the moment they are locked into council accommodation. In this process the councils have a part to play, as do housing associations, co-ownership and the private sector. All have a part to play, and if one sector is neglected it will be to the detriment of the whole.

8.30 p.m.

Mr. John Ovenden: There are two points in the remarks of the hon. Member for Buckingham (Mr. Benyon) with which I agree. I share his scepticism about any statistics advanced by the hon. Member for Henley (Mr. Heseltine) and I agree with him that both the public and private sectors have a part to play in solving our housing problems.
Having heard the speech of the hon. Member for Henley and the echo of its sentiments in the speech of the hon. Member for Aberdeen, West (Mr. Fairgrieve), we wonder whether we were listening to Conservative Party policy. So often the Opposition appear to feel that there is a conflict between the public and the private sector. They appear to take the view that it is impossible for

Labour Members to support owner-occupation or to give help to owner-occupiers, but the facts speak for themselves and the record is there for all to see.
Labour Governments have given more help and support to owner-occupiers than Conservatives have ever afforded to such people. It was a Labour Government who introduced the option mortgage scheme, and it was a Labour Government who introduced the Home Purchase Assistance and Housing Corporation Guarantee Bill. In 1974 the Labour Government stepped in to stop interest rates rising from 11 per cent. to 11½ per cent., and thus avoid the crippling effect which such a move would have had on young married couples who wished to buy their first homes. In contrast, it was a Conservative Government who sat idly by while house prices rocketed and millions of young couples were forced out of the housing market altogether. The record is there for all to see and we do not need to apologise for our stand on this issue.
The Government's prime responsibility rests in the public sector. It is the area in which the Government have the most direct responsibility and control. Those who find themselves in greatest need will continue to look to the public sector for lie solution of their problems. They look to that sector because they are unable to solve their problems in any other way. Therefore, the Opposition's attitude on public sector housing is disturbing. We have yet to hear the speech of the hon. Member for Homsey (Mr. Rossi), but when he spoke a year and a day ago in a similar debate on 20th June 1977 he said—I take it he was speaking on behalf of the official Opposition:
We believe that local authorities should concentrate new building on the sectors of the community that are not able to help themselves—the elderly, the disabled and those in need."—[Official Report, 20th June 1977 Vol. 933, c. 1010.]
I do not know to what "need" the hon. Gentleman was referring; he did not say. Presumably, he was not referring to people in need of housing. I suppose he was referring to the deserving poor—the needy. This appears to be the Conservatives' attitude to public sector housing. They believe that it should play only a residual role. They see no place for the public sector in making a major


contribution to this country's housing problems.
It is evident from the hon. Gentleman's statement, and from similar statements made by the Opposition, that the re-election of a Conservative Government would mean a drastic reduction in the level of public sector house building. In a previous housing debate the hon. Member for Henley went almost so far as to admit that that was the case. The only figure on which he would not be drawn was the target figure at which a Conservative Government would aim.
It has long been the policy of Conservative Governments to support the rundown of local authority building. That was effectively demonstrated in the period between 1970 and 1974. It was the only area in which that Conservative Government demonstrated any great success. Their policy was extremely effective. They managed to reduce public sector house building to what was almost a postwar record low. That was the situation in which the Labour Government took over our affairs.
I congratulate the Government on their achievements in the first two years of office, when there was an enormous increase in the level of public sector building, but lately the trend has been somewhat disturbing. Last year public sector starts were the lowest since 1973, and the first four months of this year do not give many of us much cause for optimism. The reasons are debatable. I believe that the heavy hand of the Treasury, having descended a year ago on the building programme, had a more drastic effect than some of my hon. Friends are prepared to accept. I also believe that the advent of Conservative councils in many stress areas had an undeniable effect, in terms of cutting back the level of house building.
These issues are debatable, but the facts are inescapable. The fact is that we are allowing our building programme to slump. I hope that my right hon. and hon. Friends on the Front Bench will not sit idly by and allow their policies to be undermined either by indefference or by sabotage on the part of Conservative authorities, but that they will try to get the nation back to a level of public sector building which we man-

aged to achieve in the first two years of the present Labour Government.
This debate has been somewhat disappointing. It was called on the initiative of the Official Opposition and we thought that they would put forward some positive ideas. However, apart from a valuable contribution by the hon. Member for Cheltenham (Mr. Irving), to whom I must pay tribute, we have heard little in the way of positive suggestions.
The hardy annual involving the sale of council houses has been trotted out. Whatever else the sale of council houses does or does not achieve, it must be said that it does not add one house to our stock. All it does is to transfer houses from the public to the private sector. In doing so, it undermines and gravely damages the prospects of those in greatest housing need. It is ludicrous for Conservative Members to argue that one can reduce the stock of public sector housing without its having an effect on the housing chances of those on the waiting lists.
I heard the hon. Member for Henley, in an unusually frank intervention, admit that the Conservatives are no longer claiming that they will use the money gained from sales to replace the properties that are sold. Few of us ever thought that they would, but that was their line until recently. The Conservative Party is committed to a reduction in the overall stock of public sector housing. That is an irresponsible and cynical attitude, which shows a total disregard for the interests of people in housing need. It is obvious that the only intention of their policy is to pick up a few cheap votes. That is what has seemed to motivate every suggestion from the Conservatives in the last few months.
I hope that tenants who may be tempted by that policy will ask themselves what would have happened if the Conservative municipal asset strippers had been in business 10 or 20 years ago, when those tenants were waiting on the housing lists in the hope of getting a council house. I can assure those tenants that if the asset strippers had been unloading council houses as quickly as they could, there would be no council houses for people to move into. Those who may be tempted to buy their council houses can rest assured that if they had been born 10 or 20 years later they would not


have had the chance of even renting a council house, let alone buying one. I hope that tenants will respond and realise that the Conservatives' policy is a cheap, vote-catching gimmick, which undermines the hope of a decent housing policy and a decent chance for those in housing need.
The Conservatives' policy not only reduces the stock of council houses; it affects the balance of the housing stock. My hon. Friend the Member for Birmingham, Ladywood (Mr. Sever) referred to the problems caused to those in high-rise blocks by the indiscriminate sale of council houses. Of course the Conservatives are no longer talking just about sales to sitting tenants. The hon. Member for Aberdeenshire, West (Mr. Fairgrieve) did not seem to understand this point when I intervened in his speech. Tory councils are putting into practice policies that involve the transfer of tenants from one property to another which they can purchase.
This policy will mean that all the best and most attractive council property will be sold and the older houses and high-rise blocks will be left. The Medway Borough Council, which includes part of my constituency, has said that it will put on the open market all council houses that become vacant and will leave them on the market empty for weeks before offering them to tenants on the waiting list. That is a gross insult to people in great housing need and to those who wish to transfer to other accommodation.

Mr. Sever: Is my hon. Friend aware that I have been asked by a constituent to investigate the ludicrous situation in Birmingham, where it is alleged that a lady aged at least 75 has recently been granted a 30-year mortgage in order to buy a local authority property? That is how desperate the Tories are to sell properties in Birmingham.

Mr. Ovenden: The sale of council houses will never involve a recognition of housing need. Those with money and the ability to buy will benefit and those who do not have the ability to buy will suffer. However, the rest of the council tenants will also suffer from this policy as they have to meet the financial burdens outlined by my hon. Friend the Member for Mitcham and Morden (Mr. Douglas-Mann).
I should like to see a ban on the sale of all council houses in areas where there is an unsatisfied demand for rented accommodation. The Government should act on those lines. They have stated in a circular that they believe it wrong that council houses should be sold in those circumstances. It is totally wrong for the Government, having stated that, to sit back and see their policy completely ignored by Conservative authorities that have no regard for housing needs.
If the Government feel that they cannot go that far, at least they should say that sales must be restricted to genuine sitting tenants. We should not have the auction of council houses that is taking place in many authorities. At least the Government should withdraw the 20 per cent. discount. It is irresponsible for a Government to say that the policy of certain authorities is undesirable and irresponsible, and yet to allow local authorities to subsidise that irresponsible policy. It is about time the Government came off the fence to make it clear where they stand. They have said where they stand, but they should put some action behind their words.
I welcomed the announcement of future policy made by my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State. I especially welcomed his statement about the ceiling on rents. It will be based upon the increase in average earnings, and rents will be kept below that level. That will be good news for council tenants, especially for those who have read the statements of the Shadow Chancellor of the Exchequer and know what is in store for them if a Conservative Government come to power. They now know what sort of rent increases are on the way for them.
The Government's record of looking after council house tenants and keeping rents down to realistic levels is one of which they can be rightly proud. The Secretary of State's statement will be widely welcomed throughout the country. However, I ask my right hon. Friend further to consider rents. Even with the ceiling in force, there are still many ways in which council tenants can be treated unfairly.
Council tenants can be faced with unnecessary rent increases because of the unfair burdens that in many areas are placed on the housing revenue accounts.


I refer especially to the placing on the accounts of the whole cost of sheltered accommodation, which should be a charge against the community as a whole. The whole cost of the provision of community halls, open spaces, playgrounds and other such facilities are generally provided by the general rate fund but in some instances are loaded on to the housing revenue account when they cover council areas. Council tenants are paying for these services when paying their rates, as are other ratepayers. They should not be faced with having to pay for them twice as a result of the attitude of Conservative authorities that are placing unnecessary and unjustified burdens upon them.
I give a warm welcome to my right hon. Friend's announcement that councils will be enabled to tie their mortgage rates to those of the building societies. Many borrowers from local authorities have faced heavy burdens over recent years because of the level of interest charges that they have had to pay. Many of us have made representations to the Secretary of State and other Ministers. We are glad that the Secretary of State has listened.
We are talking mainly about those who are on lower incomes—those buying the lower range of property in terms of value. Those are the borrowers who have local authority mortgages. Those are the borrowers who have been bearing an unnecessary burden. I am glad that my right hon. Friend will give the local authorities the chance to put matters right. I hope that the local authorities that have been shouting so much over the past few years will take the opportunity and act to reduce the burden.
We have much to be proud of in our housing record over the past few years and months. However, we have nothing to be complacent about. If the Minister answers no other points that I have made, I hope that he will say a few words about the decline in public sector house building, which many of us find extremely disturbing.

8.44 p.m.

Mr. Michael Latham: As a director of a house building company I wish to talk about land, which has not been discussed so far. I take that course in taking up the remarks of the hon. Member for Gravesend (Mr. Ovenden).
The core of the Government's land policy is the community land scheme. The late Mr. Anthony Crosland described it in 1974 as
the beginning of the end of a lone crusade.
We know now what the crusade achieved in the first year of State trading—namely, 1976–77. In that year English local authorities bought 1,571 acres of land, of which 832 acres was for housing. They paid £12·1 million for that land. They resold 32·2 acres for housing for £295,000. They sold 0·75 acres for industry at an unrevealed price and resold one commercial property in Hampshire at an undisclosed price.
In Scotland 66·5 acres were bought for £427,000, none of it for housing, and none was resold. Meanwhile, 97 English and Scottish circulars, orders, directions and letters were issued by Ministers about the Act. That is a ratio of three to one in favour of paper transactions as opposed to sales of land.
Until last Monday, the Secretary of State had not favoured us with any figures for 1977–78, except for his estimate in the House on 21st March that a further 350 to 400 acres would be resold in England. We now know that the Department got that figure wrong. Only 800 acres was bought in 1977–78—half the total for the previous year—and only 100 acres was resold, of which 75 acres was for housing. The estimate on 21st March of 350 to 400 acres has thus become 100 acres by June. There is no apology and no mention of this in any guidance note to the Press.
All that one can say about the 100 acres is that it is three times as good as 33, and the total of 133 acres so far disposed of just about equals the number of Whitehall circulars and letters so far produced. We have good parity under this Government: one acre, one circular in the Marsham Street paper-chase. In any case, 133 acres is a pathetic contribution towards land needs. Of course, 75 acres of housing land resold this year is enough for 750 houses.
Unfortunately, it might take 221½ years, on the Goverment's estimate, to develop the land on which those houses will be built, because the Minister's brand new circular on land on Monday admits that
typical annual production on a large site is unlikely to exceed 30 houses.


So we have a net loss this year of £6½ million under the community land scheme and another £20 million loss in the previous two years to provide 133 acres of land in England, which is about the size of one-medium sized Wimpey site. But I should bet that if Wimpey had bought and sold 133 acres it would not have lost £26½ million on the deal and it certainly would not have lost £26½ million of taxpayers' money. That is the core of what it is all about.
Developers do not naturally look to local authorities to provide land for them. That is the vital flaw in the Government's land scheme. It is failing not solely because the Government cut back the finance in December 1976, nor is it failing because of the abysmally slow procedure of the structure planning system which is already so late. Certainly they are contributory factors, but they are not vital. The land scheme is failing because the only efficient and speedy way for land to come on to the market and to be developed is for the builder or developer to use his commercial expertise, to identify a possible site, to go to the landowner, to negotiate a price, to buy the land and then to put houses on it. If the price is right, a deal can be struck in days—sometimes hours—and the land is conveyed and work begins.
It is not like that with local government. With local government we have the full panoply of committees, investigations, councils, the district auditor and all the necessary requirements of public accountability.
The basic fallacy of the land scheme has always been the same—that the public sector could assist and expedite the flow of land by coming between the vendor and the purchaser. That is a contradiction in terms. That is why the duties imposed on local authorities under the Act to do their best to bring more land into public ownership or control are fundamentally hostile to private development, as their authors probably intended them to be.
There can be no progress that way. It is a blind alley—as blind as the Land Commission, which the late Mr. Richard Crossman rightly called "a total failure" and which his diaries reveal that he knew to be a failure from the very start of the scheme.
The main role of local government should not be to initiate land purchase for private development. It may have a useful back-up function in voluntary co-operation with private developers, just as it has done for many years in city centre redevelopment. Industrial sites in particular may also be assembled in that way. But it is undesirable in principle and unworkable in practice that the organisation to which Parliament has given the duty of deciding whether to grant planning permission should also seek to be the dominant force in the market for buying land. That is why the Community Land Act is failing and that is why it will continue to fail. That way—the State trading way—lies bad planning, slow development, the risk of corruption and the certainty of increased bureaucracy and expense.

8.50 p.m.

Mr. Jahn Lee: The hon. Member for Melton (Mr. Latham) has given us a dissertation on the Community Land Act. My view is that the more I see Labour local authorities slapping compulsory purchase orders on properties the happier I shall be. We might be able to avoid some of the ramifications and difficulties that are inherent in that admirable Act if there is an absolute plethora of compulsory purchase orders.
My hon. Friend the Member for Thurrock (Dr. McDonald) raised the question of gazumping. That same subject featured in a debate on the Estate Agents Bill, which is being reluctantly processed through the House at the moment. The hon. Member for Wirral (Mr. Hunt) raised the matter on that occasion. Both he and my hon. Friend in different ways have drawn attention to a problem that has exercised many of us for a long time.
It is a curious historic survival of an Act that was passed in the seventeenth century—the Statute of Frauds—whereby, at total variance with the position in contract law as a whole, the consideration of the stakeholder, being such as it is, does not represent a binding contract in the sale of a house.
This matter has been the source of no end of heartache, of disappointment and of considerable loss for many people. I have been the victim of gazumping in the past. We all know of people who have


suffered in this way. It is the more extraordinary because it is clearly something that could be easily rectified by a simple Act.
It is worth remembering that as a general principle of contract law, if there is consideration for a promise, and the consideration moves against the promise, there is a binding and therefore actionable contract in the event of breach.

Mr. Nick Budgen: The hon. Member for Birmingham, Handsworth (Mr. Lee) is well known as a practising lawyer. It is wrong of him to give the impression that legislation preventing gazumping could easily be entered into and that it is only the bias and incompetence of this House that prevents our passing such legislation. If we had any sort of legislation which did away with the necessity for evidence in writing the contract would be binding on both sides, and very great hardship would be done to many people who are prepared to make an offer on a house without knowing what legal and other difficulties may be involved.

Mr. Lee: I cannot see that it would cause hardship to anybody merely to amend the law to bring it into line with what is the fact in regard to options in other areas. One can have an option contract in regard to other matters not involving an interest in land. There are no great difficulties in evidencing it. In any event, the hardship that would be caused by a change in the law could be as nothing compared with the hardships that are involved when people deliberately breach an undertaking.
One does not look too closely for morality in contract, but if a bargain is a bargain in a whole host of other situations, and if a person can be acted against for ratting on a bargain, as he can, it would be perfectly feasible and right for that to be implemented in this respect.
I go a stage further and say that although an element of punitive damages has rarely featured in the law on contract, except in regard to bounced cheques—and there it applies because that is a form of constructive defamation—it would be reasonable if it were possible for some element of that to be involved in gazumping.
I am at a loss to see how the hon. Member for Wolverhampton, South-West (Mr. Budgen) can make the points he does about evidence. Letters are always exchanged in these matters. One rarely comes across the sale of a house where there is nothing in writing. But that would not provide any difficulty. It would also act as an element of restraint upon the estate agents' profession, which is wholly in need of regulation. Whether the current Bill is the most appropriate way of doing that I know not. It is certainly a profession which needs regulation in relation to that matter, because estate agents are very often privy to the mean and unfortunate situations that arise time and again. As has been pointed out, in an inflationary situation the propensity for this abuse to occur is the greater.
I want to raise one other matter which is, in a sense, of a quasi-constituency character. I do not know whether my right hon. Friend will have time to refer to it in his reply. When a house is demolished under a compulsory purchase order, as part of a slum clearance or for any other purpose, and damage is done to an adjoining property, as far as I can see, unless there is evidence of negligence in regard to that, there is no claim that the owner of the adjoining property can levy on the local authority. Indeed, I had such a case in the Aston ward, in my constituency, where not only was this deemed to be the case, and the advice given to the local authority was to that effect, but when, rather honourably, the authority offered to make an ex gratia payment to compensate for the damage that had unavoidably been done to an adjoining terraced house the city's solicitor promptly advised that such a payment would be ultra vires and that if it were made there would be dangers of a surcharge from the district auditor.
I cannot think that that can be right. I should have thought that this problem would arise quite often. In the particular instance that was drawn to my attention some time ago, the person concerned was well able, financially, to provide for the repair, but the fact remains that there will be many instances where that will not be so, where hardship can be caused, and in respect of which I think it is only reasonable that there should be some


amendment of the law so as to provide against that kind of injustice.
I want to make one or two general observations in regard to the debate. The Minister deserves to be commended for many things that he said in the debate, not least with regard to the desirability of a tenants' charter. Also, I was very pleased to hear that the Government are taking a stand against the sale of council houses, though not as strong a stand as I would wish them to take.
I should like to hear a little more about what the Minister thinks of the default behaviour of certain local authorities. Where a Conservative-controlled local authority has flatly refused to build housing on anything like a reasonable scale, is that not the kind of situation in which the default procedures might reasonably be brought into effect?
I remember, years ago, when the Coventry City Council was brought to book by a Conservative authority for failing to spend money on what we comically call civil defence, its powers in respect of civil defence were withdrawn. I should like to know whether the Minister would be prepared to face the row—I think that he would do so with equanimity—that might be involved in withholding funds from a local authority which persistently failed to build houses and persistently indulged in a policy of selling off local authority houses notwithstanding the fact that it had a long waiting list.

Mr. Molloy: To illustrate that point even further, in the London borough of Ealing we have almost 300 homeless families and about 8,000 people on the waiting list. In three years of a Tory-controlled council it constructed 30 housing units. In the following four years of a wicked Labour Council the council managed to construct only 3,500.

Mr. Michael Morris: Speak up.

Mr. Molloy: I shall speak up, and very loudly, for half an hour if necessary. I hope that Conservative Members will listen to this. A Tory council was returned to power, and within a month one of the first things that it did—I must repeat this, because although we have heard some sincere statements from Conservative

Members tonight they do not realise what some of their colleagues in local government, such as those in the London borough of Ealing—

Mr. Deputy Speaker (Mr. Bryant Godinan Irvine): Order. Had the hon. Member wished to make a speech he could have taken other steps to do so. A number of hon. Members have been sitting in the Chamber all day waiting to speak.

Mr. Molloy: With respect, Mr. Deputy Speaker, although, quite rightly, you have called me to order for going on for too long, I find it remarkable that you were not a little more keen to prevent the interruptions which tempted me.
It is vital that we in this House understand that some of the sins committed by local authorities cause great pain to ordinary families. One set of Conservative councilors—

Mr. Deputy Speaker: Order. I call the hon. Member for Birmingham, Handsworth (Mr. Lee) to resume his speech.

Mr. Lee: I am seized of the point made by my hon. Friend. His local authority is only one, alas, of many examples. The Minister will lose no popularity, and will, I suspect, gain a great deal if, when faced with blatant examples of the kind to which my hon. Friend referred, he is prepared to use his powers to intervene in the way that I have suggested. No doubt there will be squeals of rage from the Conservative Benches, but that is something that we can bear with fortitude.

9.1 p.m.

Mr. Arthur Jones: I want to refer to the question of the nationalisation of the building industry. It is a matter that was avoided by the Secretary of State during his speech earlier today, and I suspect that the proposals that are contained in the document "Labour's Policy on Construction" are somewhat of an embarrassment to him. I sense that that is the case in respect of a number of Labour Members, and when the hon. Member for Liverpool, Walton (Mr. Heller) gets on his feet to talk about nationalisation it is always by way of trying to explain away the content of this document.
I have been interested to look through the Socialist Party's proposals for the building industry, the material producers and suppliers and the professions which create the activity and provide the support for about 2 million people employed in construction and related activities. For the last-mentioned, the so-called "constructional professionals", to use the jargon in the document, the Socialists propose that
their education should be taken out of the hands of professional institutions and controlled by a body representing the whole industry, perhaps the Construction Industry Training Board".
That proposal is contained in recommendation No. 54 of the policy background paper to which I have referred. It is an example of the fallacious and irresponsible submissions which appear throughout the document and in its 60 proposals to which, according to Mr. Ron Hayward in his foreword, his national executive committee
has given its broad endorsements to the basic policies set out".
The text is in no way attributed to its authors or those who comprised the study group.
We are told, again by the general secretary of the Labour Party, that Ministers, Members of Parliament, trade unionists and individual party members made available their experience and expertise. It would be helpful to know in what particular field their expertise lies. The absence of any reference to active responsibility for running a successful enterprise begs a question or two. Incidentally, no death-bed confessions are in evidence from any of the intended victims.
With a colleague, I have been in the building industry for about 30 years. We have never had more than 60 or 70 employees and have always backed our judgment with our own money or that which we borrowed from the banks. I assure the House that this document is no more than an academic exercise, put together, I suspect, in the main by those with little or no practical experience of the building industry or, for that matter, of anything else which is the subject of their research. Its purpose is to try to justify the long-term objective of active Socialists.
I quote from the booklet. Paragraph 6, under the heading "Public Ownership", states:
A central tenet of Labour's philosophy is the need to take out of private hands and bring into social ownership the 'commanding heights' of the economy.
There is no question, it should be noted, of building up State-owned companies. That would be the hard way of proving whether publicly owned enterprises could be made successful. Instead, the document suggests in paragraphs 43 to 46 that it should be done by the acquisition of a whole series of major and successful companies, including English China Clay, Redland, Consolidated Gold Fields—that clearly proved irresistible—Ready Mix Concrete, Hoveringham, Pilkington, BP Industries, Associated Portland Cement, one of a number of companies in the cement business which would be taken over, and London Brick. The Socialists had already promised us in their October 1974 manifesto that they would nationalise mineral rights.
We see no indication here of the costs involved. They do not tell us, the country and the taxpayer what it will all cost. A vast amount of money will be required from the British people by way of rates and taxes. It will be a forced investment for all of us and an outgoing commitment by way of undefined administrative costs.
No estimate is given of the outcome in building costs, an important factor here. Home and overseas output was £875 million in 1975–76. Therefore, what the industry is being threatened with is not only the takeover of its home-based operations but the risk to which a vast enterprise overseas will be subject.
Furthermore, we are told nothing about increased effectiveness of the labour force and the need for its mobility. Indeed, the competitive nature of the industry is deplored. Recommendation No. 22 says that competitive tendering should be used much less. This is really a sop to some direct labour organisations.
Among the recommendations, there are a number of real gems. In No. 14 we see:
The construction implications of public expenditure plans should be more effectively communicated to the industry, and procedures for assessing construction implications strengthened.


In No. 14 we have this:
The best forward planning systems for capital programmes already operating in the public sector should be extended more widely.
No. 16 is:
A proportion of future public expenditure on construction should be guaranteed against spending cuts.
How that is to be done, there is no explanation. We are not told how a Socialist Administration would have coped with the decline in the industry's output by 25 per cent. in the last four years.
Registered unemployment (seasonally adjusted) in construction as such rose from 80,000 in November 1973 to 214,000 in February 1977, including some 66,000 skilled craftsmen.
There is a summary going with the building materials sector on page 50, and it reads just like an academic exercise. It says:
We have outlined in this section a strategy for introducing public accountability into the building materials sector—a major sector of both of our manufacturing and extractive industries—and thus ensuring an adequate and planned supply of material inputs for the construction industry. We believe it will be an early priority of the new State holding companies in the contracting and building materials sector to investigate whether vertical integration between the production and assembly sides of the industry, which some large private contractors are already developing, can yield further improvements in efficiency and in planning.
That really is jargon of the worst description. I was hoping to intervene in the Secretary of State's speech to ask him to explain the word "oligopoly" which appears on page 36:
We note that there is a much higher degree of oligopoly"—
that rhymes with "monopoly"—
in the industry than is immediately apparent from the overall statistics of the number of firms.
I must confess that I had to look the word up, and I found that it is a
State of limited competition between a few producers or sellers".
That is an indication of the academic exercise with which we are concerned.
I recognise that the proposals in the document are not as yet, in their totality, Socialist Party policy. Whether they will be, I make no judgment. However, they are such that the country must be warned. They are the unavoidable face of

Socialism and must be vigorously opposed by every proper means. The industry itself has an important part to play, as, indeed, have those who work in it. Two million people are affected; they must be fully informed. I judge that, if provided with the facts, they will scornfully reject them. This, I think, is an indictment of the document, and I can well understand the embarrassment of the Secretary of State and his senior colleagues and many Labour Members.

9.6 p.m.

Mr. Hugh Rossi: This has been a wide-ranging debate and the House will, I hope, forgive me if, rather than seeking to comment on the many and varied points made, I concentrate on the Secretary of State's speech, particularly as I understand that the Minister for Housing and Construction wants a full half-hour in which to reply.
The Secretary of State drew our attention to the Government's Green Paper on housing as representing the Government's objectives in housing. I derived much hope from this, since, with its technical volumes, the paper represents a deeply researched analysis by the Department into our housing problems. It showed that whilst the vast majority of our people are adequately housed—indeed, housed to a very high standard compared with the rest of Europe—there remain severe pockets of housing stress and of poor standards of housing, particularly in our older towns and cities. It showed, therefore, the need to shift the emphasis of public resources away from indiscriminate new building, tower blocks and large council estates, towards a sensitive revitalisation of our ageing and substandard stock.
It showed also that, given the choice, the majority of people in this country prefer to own their own homes rather than to be someone else's tenant, even of the most benevolently-disposed local authority. The Secretary of State knows that in the technical volume No. II a sample survey shows that 87 per cent. of our young married couples aspire to home ownership. But within the same sample, 49 per cent. believe that they will never be able to attain it. My belief is that the duty of politicians is to try to see that those aspirations are fulfilled.
The document also showed that public sector provision was a particularly expensive way of meeting housing need, and to that extent it reinforced the arguments shown in the "Neddy" report which the right hon. Gentleman will remember I had cause to leak a little while previously. That showed that for the same amount of public money, one could house three families in the private sector for every one family that could be housed in the public sector.
The Green Paper also showed that the public sector by itself, given the constraints of the economy, could not solve the problem in areas of housing stress, particularly for the homeless and the young mobile, and therefore reliance had to be placed on the private landlord, to whom encouragement rather than condemnation had to be given. Indeed, this was followed by the Government's own consultative document on the private rented sector, which emphasised that we had to help the private landlord if we were to solve our housing problems.
These are all conclusions to which the Conservative Party has long since adhered, and I saw the Green Paper as containing the seeds of a bipartisan approach to housing—something which I greatly welcome, since I have always deplored the use of housing as a political football in a game where the only losers are those in need of a decent home.
Therefore, I was much encouraged by the Secretary of State when he extended the Green Paper approach by the announcement which he made today. In the main, the legislative proposals are those which we can support and, indeed, which we ourselves would bring in. My right hon. Friends and myself have in recent years advocated a tenants' charter. My hon. Friend the Member for Birmingham, Hall Green (Mr. Eyre) has twice introduced a Bill which the Government have ensured will not see the light of day.
Part of our charter will, of course, include the right to buy one's own home, if a council tenant. But for those tenants who do wish to buy, or who are unable to buy, we shall provide a standard form of tenancy agreement spelling out their rights—something to which the right hon. Gentleman drew attention. We shall give

them a greater say in the management of their estates. We shall give them the right to carry out improvements.
The only adverse comment that I would make of the Secretary of State's announcement is that in February 1974 the Labour Party offered a new deal for council tenants but nothing has happened in its four years in office. Here the offer is again taken out, dusted over and produced. Why? Possibly because we are now approaching another General Election. The right hon. Gentleman will forgive me if we approach that promise with a little cynicism.
I also welcome the proposal that local authority mortgage interest rates are to be kept in line with building society rates. But there must be a word of caution, because just as local authority rates come down more slowly than building society rates—because of the way in which local authority loans are financed—equally, they go up more slowly. If we bring into being a proposal of this kind, at some point in time borrowers from local authorities may feel themselves a little unfairly treated compared with the historical situation.
The proposal with regard to guarantees for mortgages by building societies through local authorities is also extremely sensible and long overdue. I should like an assurance that a guarantee will not continue to be treated by the Treasury as a loan of money and, therefore, part of the capital allocation. This is the way in which it has been dealt with up till now. Local authorities may well feel that they would rather loan money direct and help people themselves than use up that same capital allocation by underwriting building societies. Therefore, it is most important to ensure that guarantees are not treated as part of that allocation. I hope that the Minister will give us the assurance that this has been negotiated with the Treasury and that the Treasury now accepts this concept.
With regard to the Rent Acts, I can accept all that the Secretary of State said about this matter. Of course, security of tenure is of little consequence to the non-resident landlord. Provided he gets a reasonable return on his investment he does not mind who his tenant is. There is no need for anyone to seek or threaten to remove security of tenure. Inasmuch as the hon. Member for Mitcham and


Morden (Mr. Douglas-Mann) asked me, I give him the assurance on the Floor of the House—as I have done publicly in other places—that it is not the intention of the Conservative Party to remove security of tenure from those people.

Mr. Douglas-Mann: Will the hon. Gentleman tell the House whether, together with security of tenure, he will retain any form of rent regulation?

Mr. Rossi: I shall come to those points. I am conscious that the Minister wants a certain amount of time. But there is another problem with regard to the resident landlord. I understood the right hon. Gentleman to say that it is necessary to assist landlords in that situation to get back their property much more rapidly than they are able to under the law at present, when it is just and right that they should have it. Again, we concur.
There is also the lunatic situation today in which people leave their homes empty when they go abroad, or go to another part of the country, because they dare not let. Of course, an exception must be made to the provisions of the Rent Acts in order to cover that situation.
We are most conscious of the fact that, as the Green Paper says, there is a crude surplus of property over people requiring homes. We believe that that surplus exists mostly in properties which would otherwise be rented but are deliberately kept empty because it is felt that the Rent Acts are unfair. Therefore, we have brought forward the concept of short-holds and we shall legislate on this, so that, where a property is unlet when the legislation is introduced, if it is then let on a fixed-term tenancy it will not be subject to the security of the Rent Acts. In that way, we hope to tap this unused supply and bring supply and demand into balance.
As for rent regulation, of course it is necessary, particularly in areas of housing stress, to ensure that advantage is not taken of an unfair market situation. But there are anomalies. The rent officer and rent tribunal systems operate side by side, one applying fair rents and the other reasonable rents as a criterion. The Secretary of State did not mention that. Those two should be integrated, and a common criterion should be applied which gives a reasonable and fair return

to the owner of the property to ensure that he is encouraged to let rather than discouraged from letting, the property, while ensuring at the same time that rogues cannot exploit a difficult situation.
A residential landlord who has let part of his premises is today subject to capital gains tax on that part of the property which has been let. Our evidence shows that, particularly in the university cities, that is a disincentive to letting to students. We would remove it. My hon. Friends are seeking to press an amendment to the present Finance Bill in Committee to achieve just that. It will be interesting to see to what extent the Government believe in helping the residential landlord by the attitude which they take to that amendment.
I also welcome what the Secretary of State said about improvement grants. However, we must first make sure that the conditions attached to the grants are relaxed. Far too high a standard is required by local authorities as to other works which have to be done in addition to that for which the grant is sought. When people face that additional expenditure, they do not take up the grant. Often, by any objective judgment, those extra works are not really necessary, but the local authority is compelled to require them by the form of the legislation.
There is also the question of rateable value limits, which should be relaxed. However, the Secretary of State's statement rings a little hollow when we consider that only 48 per cent. of the proposed expenditure in Block II for improvement grants in the private sector has been approved by his Department for this year. That does not seem to add up to the statement that he has made about his policy.
So far, sweetness and light, but I do not find the rest of the right hon. Gentleman's speech so attractive. Of course he has to rally the troops and raise their morale, since he is about to lead them into battle. But, as my hon. Friend the Member for Henley (Mr. Heseltine) said, the Government's housing programme has been a disaster, despite the brave face that the right hon. Gentleman placed upon it.
My hon. Friend spelled out the figures. Quite uncharacteristically, we had from


the right hon. Gentleman a virulent outburst against the AMA because the Association had dared issue a Press statement to the effect that the Government were allowing it only 69 per cent. of local authority bids for capital expenditure for housing.
Of course, that kind of statement is very inconvenient when the Secretary of State is trying to persuade the House that the alibi for the disastrous programme is that the wicked Tory councils have not done their work. When someone produces figures to show that they have not been given the money to do that work, it becomes rather inconvenient. The Secretary of State then attacks the AMA and says that the secretary did not have the authority of his chairman to make that statement. I do not know how long that chairman will remain chairman. I understood that he was on his way out, and that his views did not represent those of the AMA at present.
If the Secretary of State does not like the AMA figures, perhaps I could refer him to the figures produced by the National Federation of Building Trades Employers. In its report and comment on the housing investment programme, it summarises its conclusions:
Local authorities in England wanted to invest £3,521 million in housing in 1978–79—an increase of 52 per cent. in real terms over what they were allowed to spend in 1977–78. Central government have approved only 69 per cent. on average of the local authorities' housing investment plans for that year.
It may well be that the Secretary of State will say that a 52 per cent. increase is far too large, and therefore he must cut back. That is all very well, but he cannot say at the same time that local authorities do not want to spend that money. He cannot have it both ways.
The report continues:
For the year 1978–79 the level of local authority housing investment approved by the Government is only 4 per cent. higher on average than the level of the previous year (which had been the lowest for many years).
If one looks at the Government's White Paper on public expenditure, Command 7049, one sees that the total authority investment capital expenditure in 1977–78 was the lowest for many years. One also finds that for 1977–78 it was lower than for 1976–77, which in turn was lower than for 1975–76, which was lower than

for 1974–75. It is still lower than for 1973–74 and for 1972–73. There we have the figures from this independent source which show that the Government capital investment programme is not what the Secretary of State would have us believe it is.
The Secretary of State decried our suggestion that we wished to sell council houses, or give council tenants the right to buy their own houses. That theme was echoed by some of his hon. Friends. He said this was because the Tories are against local authority housing. That is not the case. We wish to give people what they want. We believe that that is our duty. We want to help people to fulfil their aspirations. The fact is that 49 per cent. of the sample of young married couples who said they wanted to own their own homes said they could not ever see that eventuating out of their own resources.
The comment was made that this was a bad deal and that sales of council houses were not terribly successful, because the take-up was not good. On Friday I was in Nottingham and it was my pleasure to hand over the keys to the tenant of the 3,000th house sold in the past 18 months by the incoming Conservative council. That means that there are 3,000 happy council tenants who now own their homes.
The financial consequences for the local authority were very good. Capital sales total £23 million, showing a profit of almost £8 million on the original provision of those houses. That means £8 million additional worth of capital in the coffers of that local authority. The consequence on the housing revenue account is that a former deficit on the non-mandatory rate fund contribution of £1·2 million was reduced to nil in the next year. That is the consequence for the ratepayers of Nottingham. This success story could be repeated throughout the country and could transform the economy of local authorities.
One local authority told me that its housing stock was valued at £60 million. If the entire stock were sold, not only would it not be necessary to demand any subsidies at all from the Exchequer; the authority would not have to charge the ratepayers a penny rate. Indeed, it could give the ratepayers a dividend. The release of capital moneys in that


way could mean the elimination of interest charges having to be paid by the local authority, the elimination of the responsibility for repairs, and the elimination of the need for maintenance and management. This could transform the economy of the local authorities and the nation dramatically. This is what the people want.
I am not saying that we do not see any role for local authorities in housing. Of course that is not the case. As my hon. Friend the Member for Hove (Mr. Sainsbury) said, there will always be those who do not want to become home owners, and provision must be made for them. There will be those who, because of their financial circumstances, cannot become home owners. The elderly will always need to be provided for, as will the disabled and the single who do not qualify under most points schemes.
This must be the function of our society—a compassionate society—to help those who cannot help themselves. But in respect of those who can help themselves, there is no need for them to remain a burden on themselves, through their rates and taxes, and on the remainder of the community.
I could go on to outline a number of features of my party's housing programme, which I feel is the best programme this country has seen in housing for at least four decades but my agreed time is up. I shall be proud to see it presented by my right hon. and hon. Friends at the coming election.
The Minister has already said that he does not want to enter into a Dutch auction on our proposals. Of course he does not want to do so. He cannot begin to compete with our proposals. I am sure that the people of this country will well realise this, and give their decision convincingly in the not too distant future.

9.32 p.m.

The Minister for Housing and Construction (Mr. Reginald Freeson): We have all waited with great interest in this debate—a debate called by the Opposition—for the revelation of what the Opposition wish to put to the country. But all we have had is a rather empty speech from the hon. Member for Henley (Mr. Heseltine), one of the worst speeches I have heard on housing. It did no more

than garble the statistics and reiterate, in a generalised form, the subject of a statutory right for the purchase of council houses by tenants.
Beyond that, we have had nothing from the Tory Opposition in this debate. The hon. Member for Hornsey (Mr. Rossi), for a period of six or seven minutes, uttered constant cries of "me too-ism". He went through a whole series of the policy proposals which my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State for the Environment had listed in his speech and said "Me, too". He constantly said "We agree", "We agree", "We agree". He uttered not one dissident note on our proposals. He put one or two queries on their detail, but as for the general policy propositions we had advanced he did not put forward one note of disagreement.
What we have had in this debate, in essence, is garbled statistics, secondly, a reiteration of the argument about the indiscriminate sale of council houses, and, thirdly, a series of "Me, too" statements. We were told that we must await the revelation of a magnificent policy that will be the best the country has ever seen—but we know nothing about it. We have heard nothing about it except a series of "me too-isms". To call a debate on such an issue and not to reveal what is to be presented to the country with great drama and such positive pride is, to say the least, a little disappointing.

Mr. Heseltine: Will the Minister give way?

Mr. Freeson: No, not for the moment.

Mr. Heseltine: The Minister has attacked me.

Mr. Speaker: Order. It looks as though the Minister is not giving way.

Mr. Freeson: We await, with some disappointment, as will people interested in housing throughout the country, the publication of the great dramatic policy that will be the best the country has seen. We know not of it yet.

Mr. Heseltine: The Minister has accused me of producing garbled statistics. Can he give the facts that contradict any statistics that I gave?

Mr. Freeson: I shall come to several of these points later. If the hon. Member


for Henley wants a period of disappointing reading, he should look through Hansard tomorrow, because his speech will ook very impressive as the contribution of the Shadow Secretary of State on such an importantnot l subject.
It is extraordinary how little, apart from the series of "me too-isms", the Tory Party attitude to housing has changed in the last four years. There have been radical advances in housing policy in that time but only minimal changes in the content of Opposition policies. If anything, the Conservatives have retreated further into the backwoods from which they were emerging into the scrublands when we took office in 1974.
Contrary to what the hon. Member for Hornsey said about nothing having been done in the last few years and his claim that we were only now presenting our intentions, the real emphasis in housing policy has changed. By the late 1960s, the emphasis on meeting new house building targets as a singular test of success or failure by any Government was already out of date, but we had to wait until the last four years for this wider development in housing policy to take place. It is not that house building is unimportant, but we need to put it in the context of a much wider look at the real needs of people and not the needs for which politicians anticipate good Press coverage.
The work encapsulated in our housing Green Paper, which has been commended on both sides of the House, has already led to changes in policy and procedures as we have built up the work. We have not awaited the publication of the Green Paper or the policy statement that my right hon. Friend made earlier, on the basis of that Green Paper, before acting in these matters.
We shall bring forward the legislative proposals, but Conservative Members should mark the order in which action is taken. First, we establish the need by the most extensive study and analysis of housing problems in this country that has ever been undertaken. Secondly, we formulate and implement policy changes and, where necessary, carry them forward. The comprehensive Bill that my right hon. Friend outlined will do just that.
This wider development of housing policy has had a number of ingredients already. The first aspect is the quality of life. Hon. Members, not for the first time, have raised the question of high-density living, high-rise blocks and industrial building—the latter subject was raised, with much stress, by my hon. Friend the Member for Leeds, West (Mr. Dean). Action was taken from 1974 onwards, within a few months of our taking office, to put a stop to high-rise building and medium-rise accommodation for families.
There are no tall blocks or even medium-rise blocks being planned for family occupation. When we came into office, such accommodation represented nearly 20 per cent. of the total programme. It now represents less than 1 per cent. That is a worthwhile achievement. We did not await the Green Paper or legislation. We did not even await the changes in density policies that some of the structure plans, under our influence, are implementing. We took action.
We have altered density policy, which is of great significance for future housing development in our urban areas. Coupled with that, we must deal with the existing stock by changes of management policies, which are already being put in train, which we are encouraging and upon which we are giving guidance. We have stressed, as my right hon. Friend did again today, the importance of housing management initiatives and experiments in neighbourhood management schemes. We have acted upon them in conjunction with local authorities throughout the country.
When I took office in 1974, the Department did not employ one adviser or consultant on housing management. We now have a housing services advisory group, and a housing management services unit is being set in post. We have issued a full series of reports. In conjunction with about 30 local authorities throughout the country, we have undertaken studies of the worst problem housing estates. We are implementing the results of the studies. We are not awaiting some new policy or new legislation before taking action. Action is being taken now.

Mr. Michael Morris: rose—

Mr. Freeson: I shall complete my references to housing management before giving way.
We have taken a series of steps in housing management as a preliminary to the further steps that will be anchored in the legislative proposals to which my right hon. Friend referred. We have taken matters further than that. We have initiated schemes that I know were lying on my predecessor's desk in the previous Tory Administration. Conservative Members have endorsed the schemes in the House and elsewhere, but they did not act upon them when in office.
Community leasehold schemes, shared equity schemes and co-operatives are now coming forward in their hundreds in various forms throughout the country. There are almost 150 co-operative schemes in the pipeline as a result of action taken only 18 months ago. The setting up of a Co-operative Housing Agency is another measure that we have undertaken. I could quote a series of other actions that we have undertaken in contact with local authorities and in sponsoring projects at official level and ministerially. That has been going on over the past four years. It is now producing the result that lead us to provide the framework in legislation that will carry matters further forward.

Mr. Michael Morris: Why is it that in the four years that the right hon. Gentleman has been a Minister thousands more empty properties are owned by local councils, principally Labour-controlled authorities such as Camden, Islington, Haringey and the Secretary of State's borough of Tower Hamlets?

Mr. Freeson: There has not been an increase in empty properties. On the contrary. I shall list some of the projects that have been undertaken in widening tenure choice and the management systems which have contributed to that.
There has been an increase in short-life property licensing arrangements. A series of community leasehold housing associations has been sponsored. Some of the associations are now converting themselves into co-operatives. There has been a range of measures, and we have been encouraged by the fact that 40 local authorities have agreed to undertake

leasing schemes from private owners for short terms, or in some instances running up to 21-year leases on a review basis. There was only one local authority undertaking such arrangements when we came into office.
There has been a series of initiatives. We issued a report on these matters a few months ago. We collated all the different methods being applied throughout the country and issued the report to local authorities.
Where there is real, hard evidence of properties being unnecessarily empty, it behoves all public representatives, including Members of Parliament—I am now speaking as much as a Member as a Minister—to have direct contact with their town halls and to encourage actions that could be taken, either by purchase or by negotiating leasing arrangements of the sort to which I have briefly referred. Some properties will stand empty for various reasons. Some are on the market for certain periods. Others are subject to repairs. There are others that are unnecessarily empty. We must talk to the authorities and bring our influence to hear.
There have been the various initiatives to which I have referred. They have all been directed to widening the choice of tenure that is essential in housing. More than that, the schemes that I have outlined, and to which we have been giving a great deal of time in the past few years, introduce a community dimension to housing that has been missing for far too long. That is to be coupled closely with the kind of estate management and neighbourhood management experiments which we are sponsoring with a number of local authorities. Various authorities which are not directly associated with the projects which we are sponsoring are being advised about these matters. Many things are being done. We are widening choice and introducing the social dimension in housing at neighbourhood level.
I stress that one of the most important factors in widening choice is to be found in Housing Corporation and housing association work. Here I quote action, not rhetoric. For years Opposition Members, when in Government, spoke grandiosely about the third arm of housing, referring


to the housing association movement. At most they produced about 9,000 or 10,000 dwellings a year. That was the figure which was operating in 1973. For most of the earlier period the figure had been about 6,000. In the course of four years housing association work has expanded to nearly 40,000 dwellings a year.

Mr. Michael Morris: The figure is 32,000.

Mr. Freeson: It was 32,000 last year. I am speaking of 1978. But 32,000 is a threefold increase on what went on under the Conservative Government. This year it will be a fourfold increase. The facts are that in 1978 we expect to see between 35,000 and 40,000 dwellings.

Mr. Michael Morris: Thirty-five thousand?

Mr. Freeson: I said between 35,000 and 40,000 dwellings, which is nearly four times as many as under the Conservative Administration. That is an achievement of fact nor rhetoric.
The housing association movement is also moving more of its activity into inner urban areas where the greatest stress lies. It is purchasing properties for social ownership. It is modernising, repairing and converting and providing those properties at reasonable rents for people who are in the greatest need. It is also participating on an expanding scale in cooperative housing, community leasehold, shared equity and even down-market provision for sale. It has our backing and encouragement. We reject the idea that the Government are concerned with only one kind of tenure. We must aim for a variety of tenure. We do not want to see an indiscriminate eroding of rented property.
Time and again Opposition Members complain about the inadequate supply of rented housing. In fact, there are about the same numbers of rented dwellings now as there were 30 years ago. The difference is that the bulk were then privately owned and mostly sub-standard, whereas today the bulk of them are publicly owned by local authorities and housing associations and they are in mostly good condition. If we were to get rid of that kind of stock on an indiscriminate basis, which is the policy of

the Opposition, we would undermine the provision of rented housing.

Mr. Sainsbury: Does the Minister accept that, because of the change in ownership of rented dwellings, a large proportion are no longer available to single-person households or to the newly married who would not qualify for council tenancies?

Mr. Freeson: The hon. Gentleman is wrong in his understanding of the demography of the big cities. In London alone, the vast majority of single people are in accommodation. But there has been a tremendous increase in the numbers of single-person households and an inadequate total supply of housing stock in London to meet the needs of those households. There has been an increase, not a reduction, in supply, but it has been overtaken by an increase in the numbers of small households, not only in London but throughout the country.
The millions of homes now provided by local authorities and housing associations are far and away of better quality than those they replaced over the last 30 years. They are provided at reasonable rents and the majority of them are first-class homes. The fact that we are concerned to improve the standards of the worst should not blind us to the fact that this country has a proud record in the provision of decent housing and at reasonable rents. There are countries throughout Europe and many people in the Americas who would be delighted if they had anything like the provision we have made over the last 30 to 40 years. That is something not to denigrate but of which we should be proud and upon which we should build.
I turn now to the Conservative Party's policy on council house sales. Let me put to the Opposition one area of concern. It has not been this Government's policy to stop the sale of council houses. In our first policy circular in April 1974 we indicated that we had no intention of withdrawing the general consent. But we expressed the view, which we still hold, that it is wrong to undertake indiscriminate sales irrespective of the broad-based housing needs of the area and of the need to maintain a good stock of quality rented homes for those in greatest need.
That is the policy that we oppose, and that is what I ask the Opposition to consider when they talk of a so-called statutory right to buy. There already is such a statutory right. The real issue is whether there should be unqualified statutory compulsion upon local authorities indiscriminately to sell even where it can be shown that to do so would reduce the choice and reduce the number of good-quality homes for families to occupy, and even where it could be shown that there is an inadequate supply of rented housing.
We are entitled to put that concern to the Opposition when they advocate this kind of policy. We do not ask them to withdraw from a policy of council house sales as such, any more than we have withdrawn from it. We are, however, entitled to demand of public representatives who presume to take on executive responsibility in this place or in the town halls that they do not blind themselves to other needs or be so obsessed with one doctrinaire element of housing policy that they ignore all other needs It is that to which we are opposed, and if need he we shall act upon that when the time comes. We wish to see a variety of provision. That is our policy, and we urge it upon the Opposition.

Mr. Joseph Dean: Does not my right hon. Friend recall that during the last General Election campaign the Leader of the Opposition made the sale of council houses one of the strong planks of her party's platform? Is she aware that where Conservative local authorities are now offering council homes at 20 per cent. discount, the take-up is very small indeed?

Mr. Freeson: Whatever may be said in this place and at Tory Party conferences, elsewhere a good deal more sense is being shown in this respect even by Conservative councillors. That is one of the reasons why the sale of council houses, of which two-thirds are already under the control of Conservative councils throughout the country, notwithstanding the windy rhetoric that we get on this subject from the Opposition, is in practice running at a very low level in relation to the total stock and the total additional stock that is being built.
In the last few minutes available to me I want to turn to another important

aspect which concerns us and which should concern the Opposition and the country. We are glad to have received certain general assurances, at long last, about the Rent Acts in answer to questions that we have been putting to the Opposition on this matter for some time, and we take it as being on the record that the Opposition have no intention now of repealing the legislation on security of tenure or on rent regulation. That is what I understand from the statements that we have received. I hope that we shall see an end to the nagging, narking criticism of the Rent Acts that the Opposition now endorse.

Mr. Rossi: Although I have said that we shall not repeal the Rent Acts and I have given certain assurances on security of tenure and rent regulation, that is not to say that there are not more than enough defects in the Acts that need putting right, and being put right very quickly.

Mr. Freeson: I am all in favour of improving the Acts, but I am glad to have it on record that the Conservative Opposition, despite the years of nagging criticism and generalised opposition, and the undermining of people's confidence in this legislation, are in favour of security of tenure in law and of maintaining the system of rent regulation. At long last we have got that on the record, and we are glad to have it so.
Let me turn to another aspect of policy on which the Opposition have not yet come clean. That is the question of the level of investment. The hon. Member for Hornsey made much play of the bids under the housing investment programme system. He knows perfectly well, being in contact with the local authorities concerned, that some of those which have spoken so much about the bids that they have put in being cut are, in fact, at risk of underspending the sums that have been granted to them. A good deal of the bidding that went on was very questionable, to say the least. I have said frankly to local authority representatives in discussions with them throughout the country, that we want realistic bids and that we shall make sure that the investment is available on the basis of realistic programmes.
Our concern at present is that under the exhortation of leading members of


the Opposition, in this place and elsewhere, Tory councils throughout the country are going short on the investment programmes that are being allocated. What we should like to have from leading spokesmen of the Opposition is a public statement that they wish to see an expansion of investment in public sector housing, not a contraction. Will they please give us that undertaking? Or is it their intention to cut?
Or do we have to turn to the other Shadow Housing Minister, the right hon. and learned Member for Surrey, East (Sir G. Howe), who, at a stroke, in 1978 wishes to cut by £150 million the investment programmes of local authorities under the housing investment programme system? He announced that only a week or so ago. Whom are we to believe—the Shadow spokesman here or the Shadow spokesman for the Treasury, who is the other housing Shadow? The right hon. and learned Gentleman says "Cut". Does the hon. Member for Hornsey say "Cut investment programmes" after having complained about "phoney" cuts that we are supposed to have imposed? Will he please tell us—I shall gladly give way—whether he will maintain the present level of housing investment in the public sector and whether, when economic circumstances permit it, he will support an expansion of that provision? I gladly give way. [HoN. MEMBERS: "Answer."]
Well, we shall take note of this and come back to it on another occasion. The present Government will maintain the provision. We shall do our best to encourage local authorities to take up the programmes that have been allocated. It will be in new building for special needs and general needs—

Mr. Heseltine: Will the Minister give way?

Mr. Freeson: Not now. The hon. Member had his chance.
We shall do our best to make sure that councils take up the resources that have been programmed on new build, on buying substandard housing for conversion and modernisation, and for special needs, and on their allocation for home loans—

Mr. Heseltine: rose—

Mr. Freeson: —on their allocation for improvement grants and all other kinds of housing need.
We take note of the fact that, when invited to do so, the Opposition did not stand up and give an undertaking.

Mr. Heseltine: rose—

Mr. Freeson: They have refused to do so, and we take it on the record.

Mr. Heseltine: The Minister for Housing and Construction gave that pledge at the last General Election and broke it consistently year after year. Why should we believe it now?

Mr. Freeson: That is the answer. The Opposition are not going to sustain the present level. They have refused to accept the challenge put to them.

Mr. Heseltine: You did it.

Mr. Freeson: We will accept, and we are accepting the challenge. The Opposition will not do so.

Mr. Humphrey Atkins: rose in his place and claimed to move, That the Question be now put.

Question, That the Question be now put, put and agreed to.

Question put, accordingly, That this House do now adjourn:

The House divided: Ayes 250, Noes 270.

Division No. 236]
AYES
[10.00 p.m.


Altken, Jonathan
Boscawen, Hon Robert
Burden, F. A.


Alison, Michael
Bottomley, Peter
Butler, Adam (Bosworth)


Amery, Rt Hon Julian
Bowden, A. (Brighton, Kemptown)
Carlisle, Mark


Arnold, Tom
Boyson, Dr Rhodes (Brent)
Chalker, Mrs Lynda


Atkins, Rt Hon H. (Spelthorne)
Bralne, Sir Bernard
Churchill, W. S.


Atkinson, David (B'mouth, East)
Brittan, Leon
Clark, Alan (Plymouth, Sutton)


Awdry, Daniel
Brocklebank-Fowler, C.
Clark, William (Croydon S)


Baker, Kenneth
Brooke, Hon Peter
Clarke, Kenneth (Rushcllfle)


Bell, Ronald
Brotherton, Michael
Clegg, Walter


Bendall, Vivian
Brown, Sir Edward (Bath)
Cope, John


Bennett, Dr Reginald (Fareham)
Bryan, Sir Paul
Cormack, Patrick


Benyon, W.
Buchanan-Smith, Allck
Costaln, A. P.


Bitten, John
Buck, Antony
Crouch, David


Biggs-Davlson, John
Budgen, Nick
Crowder, F. P.


Body, Richard
Bulmer, Esmond
Davles, Rt Hon J. (Knutsford)




Dean, Paul (N Somerset)
James, David
Prior, Rt Hon James


Dodsworth, Geoffrey
Jenkin, Rt Hon P. (Wanat'd&amp;W'df'd)
Pym, Rt Hon Francis


Douglas-Hamilton, Lord James
Johnson Smith, G. (E Grlnstead)
Ralson, Timothy


Drayson, Burnaby
Jones, Arthur (Daventry)
Rathbone, Tim


du Cann, Rt Hon Edward
Jopling, Michael
Rees, Peter (Dover &amp; Deal)


Dunlop, John
Joseph, Rt Hon Sir Keith
Rees-Davles, W. R.


Durant, Tony
Kilfedder, James
Ronton, Rt Hon Sir D. (Hunts)


Dykes, Hugh
Kimball, Marcus
Renton, Tim (Mid-Sussex)


Eden, Rt Hon Sir John
King, Evelyn (South Dorset)
Rhodes James, R.


Edwards, Nicholas (Pembroke)
King, Tom (Bridgwater)
Rhys, Williams, Sir Brandon


Elliott, Sir William
Kltson, Sir Timothy
Ridley, Hon Nicholas


Evans, Gwynfor (Carmarthen)
Knox, David
Ridsdale, Julian


Eyre, Reginald
Lamont, Norman
Rifkind, Malcolm


Fairbairn, Nicholas
Langford-Holt, Sir John
Roberts, Wyn (Conway)


Fairgrieve, Russell
Latham, Michael (Melton)
Rossi, Hugh (Hornsey)


Farr, John
Lawson, Nigel
Rost, Peter (SE Derbyshire)


Fell, Anthony
Lester, Jim (Beeston)
Royle, Sir Anthony


Finsberg, Geoffrey
Lewis, Kenneth (Rutland)
Sainsbury, Tim


Fisher, Sir Nigel
Lloyd, Ian
St. John-Stevas, Norman


Fletcher, Alex (Edinburgh N)
Loveridge, John
Scott, Nicholas


Fletcher-Cooke, Charles
Luce, Richard
Shaw, Giles (Pudsey)


Fookes, Miss Janet
McAdden, Sir Stephen
Shelton, William (Streatham)


Forman, Nigel
McCrlndle, Robert
Shepherd, Colin


Fowler, Norman (Sutton C'fd)
Mocfarlane, Nell
Shersby, Michael


Fox, Marcus
MacGregor, John
Silvester, Fred


Faser, Rt Hon H. (Stafford &amp; St)
MscKay, Andrew (Stechford)
Sims, Roger


Freud, Clement
Macmillan, Rt Hon M. (Farnham)
Sinclair, Sir George]


Fry, Peter
McNair-Wilson, M. (Newbury)
Smith, Dudley (Warwick)


Galbraith, Hon T. G. D.
MsNalr-Wllson, P. (New Forest)
Smith, Timothy John (Ashfleld)


Gardiner, George (Relgate)
Marshall. Michael (Arundel)
Splcer, Michael (S Worcester)


Gardiner, Edward (S Fylde)
Marten, Nell
Sproat, lain


Gilmour, Rt Hon Sir Ian (Chesham)
Mather, Carol
Stalnton, Keith]


Gilmour, Sir John (East Fife)
Maude, Angus
Stanbrook, Ivor


Glyn, Dr Alan
Maudllng, Rt Hon Reginald
Stanley, John


Godber, Rt Hon Joseph
Mawby, Ray
Steen, Anthony (Wavertree)


Goodhew, Victor
Maxwell-Hyslop, Robin
Stewart, Ian (Hltchin)


Goodlad, Alastair
Mayhew, Patrick
Stokes, John


Gorst, John
Meyer, Sir Anthony
Stradling Thomas, J.


Gow, Ian (Eastbourne)
Miller, Hal (Bromsgrove)
Tapsell, Peter


Gower, Sir Raymond (Barry)
Mills, Peter
Taylor, R. (Croydon NW)


Gray, Hamlsh
Ml8campbell, Norman
Taylor, Teddy (Cathcart)


Griffiths, Eldon
Mitchell, David (Basingstoke)
Tebblt, Norman


Grimond, Rt Hon J.
Moate, Roger
Temple-Morris, Peter


Grist, Ian
Monro, Hector
Thatcher, Rt Hon Margaret


Grylls, Michael
Montgomery, Fergus
Thomas, Dafydd (Merioneth)


Hall-Davis, A. G. F.
Moore, John (Croydon C)
Thomas, Rt Hon P. (Hendon S)


Hamilton, Archibald (Epsom &amp; Ewell)
More, Jasper (Ludlow)
Townsend, Cyril D.


Hamilton, Michael (Salisbury)
Morgan, Geraint
Trotter, Neville


Hampson, Dr Keith
Morgan-Giles, Rear-Admiral
van Straubenzee, W. R.


Hannam, John
Morris, Michael (Northampton S)
Vaughan, Dr Gerard


Harvie Anderson, Rt Hon Miss
Morrison, Charles (Devizes)
Vlggers, Peter


Haselhurst, Alan
Morrison, Hon Peter (Chester)
Wainwrlghl, Richard (Colne V)


Hastlnga, Stephen
Mudd, David
Wakeham, John


Havers, Rt Hon Sir Michael
Neave, Alrey
Walder, David (Clitheroe)


Hayhoe, Barney
Nelson, Anthony
Walker, Rt Hon P. (Worcester)


Heath, Rt Hon Edward
Neubert, Michael
Walters, Dennis


Heseltine, Michael
Newton, Tony
Weatherlll, Bernard


Hicks, Robert
Normanton, Tom
Wells, John


Higgins, Terence L.
Nott, John
Whltelaw, Rt Hon William


Hodgson, Robin
Oppenheim, Mra Sally
Whitney, Raymond


Holland, Philip
Page, Rt Hon R. Graham (Crosby)
Wlggln, Jerry


Hordern, Peter
Page, Richard (Workington)
Wlgley, Dafydd


Howe, Rt Hon Sir Geoffrey
Pardoe, John
Wood, Rt Hon Richard


Howell, David (Guildford)
Parkinson, Cecil
Young, Sir G. (Ealing, Acton)


Howell, Ralph (North Norfolk)
Penhallgon, David
Younger, Hon George


Hunt, David (Wlrral)
Perclval, Ian



Hunt, John (Ravensbourne)
Peyton, Rt Hon John
TELLERS FOR THE AYES:


Hurd, Douglas
Pink, R. Bonner
Mr. Anthony Berry and


Hutchison, Michael Clark
Prentice, Rt Hon Reg
Mr. Michael Roberts.


Irving, Charles (Cheltenham)
Price, David (Eastleigh)



NOES


Abse, Leo
Bean, R. E.
Bray, Dr Jeremy


Allaun, Frank
Benn, Rt Hon Anthony Wedgwood
Brown, Hugh D. (Provan)


Anderson, Donald
Bennett, Andrew (Stockport N)
Brown, Robert C. (Newcastle W)


Archer, Rt Hon Peter
Bldwell, Sydney
Buchan, Norman


Armstrong, Ernest
Bishop, Rt Hon Edward
Buchanan, Richard


Ashley, Jack
Blenklnsop, Arthur
Butler, Mrs Joyce (Wood Green)


Ashton, Joe
Boardman, H.
Callaghan, Rt Hon J. (Cardiff SE)


Atkins, Ronald (Preston N)
Booth, Rt Hon Albert
Callaghan, Jim (Middleton &amp; P)


Atkinson, Norman (H'gey, Tott'ham)
Boothroyd, Miss Betty
Campbell, Ian


Barnett, Guy (Greenwich)
Bottomley, Rt Hon Arthur
Canavan, Dennis


Barnett, Rt Hon Joel (Heywood)
Boyden, James (Bish Auck)
Cant, R. B.


Bates, Alf
Bradley, Tom
Carmlchael, Nell







Carter, Ray
Jackson, Colin (Brighouse)
Price, William (Rugby)


Carter-Jones, Lewis
Janner, Greville
Radice, Giles


Cartwright, John
Jay, Rt Hon Douglas
Rees, Rt Hon Merlyn (Leeds S)


Castle, Rt Hon Barbara
Jeger, Mrs Lena
Richardson, Miss Jo


Clemitson, Ivor
Jenkins, Hugh (Putney)
Roberts, Albert (Normanton)


Cocks, Rt Hon Michael (Bristol S)
John, Brynmor
Roberts, Gwilym (Cannock)


Cohen, Stanley
Johnson, James (Hull West)
Robertson, George (Hamilton)


Concannon, Rt Hon John
Johnson, Waiter (Derby S)
Robertson, John (Paisley)


Conlan, Bernard
Jones, Alec (Rhondda)
Robinson, Geoffrey


Cowans, Harry
Jones, Barry (East Flint)
Roderick, Caerwyn


Cox, Thomas (Tooting)
Jones, Dan (Burnley)
Rodgers, George (Chorley)


Crawshaw, Richard
Judd, Frank
Rodgers, Rt Hon William (Stockton)


Cronin, John
Kaufman, Rt Hon Gerald
Rooker, J. W.


Crowther, Stan (Rotherham)
Kelley, Richard
Rose, Paul B.


Cryer, Bob
Kilroy-Sllk, Robert
Rowlands, Ted


Cunningham, Dr J. (Whlteh)
Kinnock, Neil
Ryman, John


Davidson, Arthur
Lambie, David
Sandelson, Neville


Davies, Bryan (Enfield N)
Lamborn, Harry
Sedgemore, Brian


Davies, Rt Hon Denzil
Lamond, James
Selby, Harry


Davies, lfor (Gower)
Latham, Arthur (Paddington)
Sever, John


Davis, Clinton (Hackney C)
Leadbitter, Ted
Shaw, Arnold (llford South)


Deakins, Eric
Lee, John
Sheldon, Rt Hon Robert


Dean, Joseph (Leeds West)
Lestor, Miss Joan (Eton &amp; Slough)
Shore, Rt Hon Peter


Dell, Rt Hon Edmund
Lever, Rt Hon Harold
Silkin, Rt Hon John (Deptford)


Dempsey, James
Litterick, Tom
Silkin, Rt Hon S. C. (Dulwich)


Dewar, Donald
Loyden, Eddie
Sillars, James


Doig, Peter
Luard, Evan
Skinner, Dennis


Dormand, J. D.
Lyon, Alexander (York)
Smith, Rt. Hon. John (N Lanarkshire)


Douglas-Mann, Bruce
Lyons, Edward (Bradford W)
Snape, Peter


Duffy, A. E. P.
Mabon, Rt Hon Dr J. Dickson
Soearlng Nigel


Dunnett, Jack
McCartney, Hugh
Spriggs, Leslie


Dunwoody, Mrs Gwyneth
MacCormick, lain
Stallard, A. W.


Eadle, Alex
McDonald, Dr Oonagh
Stewart, Rt Hon Donald


Edge, Geoff
McElhone Frank
Stewart, Rt Hon M. (Fulham)


Ellis, Tom (Wrexham)
Mae Farquher, Roderick
Stoddart, David


English, Michael
MacKenzie Rt Hon Gregor
Stott, Roger


Evans, Fred (Caerphilly)
Mackintosh, John P.
Strang, Gavin


Evans, loan (Abeidare)
Maclennan Robert
Strause, Rt Hon G. R.


Evans, John (Newton)
McMillan Tom (Glasgow C)
Summerskill, Hon Dr Shirley


Ewing, Harry (Stirling)
Madden, Max
Swain, Thomas


Fernyhough, Rt Hon E.
Magee, Bryan
Taylor, Mrs Ann (Bolton W)


Fitt, Gerard (Belfast W)
Mahon, Simon
Thomas, Jeffrey (Abertlllery)


Flannery, Martin
Mallalieu J P W
Thomas, Mike (Newcastle E)


Fletcher, L. R. (Ilkeston)
Mallalieu, J. P. W.
Thomas, Ron (Bristol NW)


Fletcher, Ted (Darlington)
Marks, Kenneth
Thorne, Stan (Preston South)


Foot, Rt Hon Michael
Marshall, Dr Edmund (Goole)
Tierney, Sydney


Ford, Ben
Marshall, Jim (Leicester S)
Tilley, John


Forrester, John
Mason, Rt Hon Roy
Tinn, James


Fowler, Gerald (The Wrekin)
Maynard, Miss Joan
Tomlinson, John


Fraser, John (Lambeth, N'w'd)
Meacher, Michael
Torney, Tom


Freeson, Rt Hon Reginald
Mellish, Rt Hon Robert
Tuck, Raphael


Garrett, John (Norwich S)
Mikardo, Ian
Varley, Rt Hon Eric G.


Garrett, W. E. (Wallsend)
Millan, Rt Hon Bruce
Wainwright, Edwin (Dearne V)


Ginsburg, David
Miller, Dr M. S. (E Kilbride)
Walker, Harold (Doncaster)


Golding, John
Mitchell, Austin (Grimsby)
Walker, Terry (Kingswood)


Gould, Bryan
Molloy, William
Ward, Michael


Gourlay, Harry
Moonman, Eric
Watkins, David


Graham, Ted
Morris, Alfred (Wythenshawe)
Watt, Hamish


Grant, George (Morpeth)
Morris, Rt Hon Charles R.
Weetch, Ken


Grant, John (Islington C)
Morris, Rt Hon J. (Aberavon)
Weitzman, David


Grocott, Bruce
Moyle, Rt. Hon. Roland
Wellbeloved, James


Hamilton, W. W. (Central Fife)
Mulley, Rt Hon Frederick
While, Frank R. (Bury)


Harper, Joseph
Murray, Rt Hon Ronald King
White, James (Pollok)


Harrison, Rt Hon Walter
Newens, Stanley
Whitlock, William


Hattersley, Rt Hon Roy
Noble, Mike
Willey, Rt Hon Frederick


Hayman, Mrs Helene
Oakes, Gordon
Williams, Rt Hon Alan (Swansea W)


Healey, Rt Hon Denis
Ogden, Eric
Williams, Rt Hon Shirley (Hertford)


Heffer, Eric S.
O'Halloran, Michael
Williams, Sir Thomas (Warrington)


Henderson, Douglas
Orme. Rt Hon Stanley
Wilson, Gordon (Dundee ET


Hooley, Frank
Ovenden, John
Wilson, Rt Hon Sir Harold (Huvton)


Horam, John
Owen, Rt Hon Dr David
Wilson, William (Coventry SE)


Howell, Rt Hon Denis (B'ham, Sm H)
Padley, Walter
Wise, Mrs Audrey


Hoyle, Doug (Nelson)
Palmer, Arthur
Woodall, Alec


Huckfield, Les
Park, George
Woof, Robert


Hughes, Rt Hon C. (Anglesey)
Parker, John
Wrigglesworth, Ian


Hughes, Robert (Aberdeen N)
Parry, Robert



Hughes, Roy (Newport)
Pavitt, Laurie
TELLERS FOR THE NOES:


Hunter, Adam
Pendry, Tom
Mr. James Hamilton and


Irvine, Rt Hon Sir A. (Edge Hill)
Perry, Ernest
Mr. Donald Coleman.


Irving, Rt Hon S. (Dartford)
Price, C. (Lewlsham W)

Question accordingly negatived.

BUSINESS OF THE HOUSE

Ordered,
That, at this day's sitting, the Parliamentary Pensions Bill and the motion relating to Ways and Means may be proceeded with, though opposed until any hour.—[Mrs. Ann Taylor.]

PARLIAMENTARY PENSIONS BILL

Order for Second Reading read.

10.18 p.m.

The Minister of State, Privy Council Office (Mr. John Smith): I beg to move, That the Bill be now read a Second time.
Like most pensions legislation this is, I am afraid, a technical and complex Bill. But the changes it seeks to introduce are not in themselves unduly difficult. There may be some aspects on which differing views in the House will be expressed—as, indeed, there always should be—but in the main I hope that this is a Bill which will commend itself to the whole House. It is not intended to be costly or controversial and I hope that it will enjoy a wide measure of support on all sides.
The purpose of the Bill is to implement the recommendations for improvements in the parliamentary contributory pensions scheme which were contained in report no. 8 from the Top Salaries Review Body. It also makes a number of lesser administrative changes in the scheme. The Review Body's report was, of course, presented to Parliament in July 1976, but at that time pay policy virtually ruled out any improvements in occupational pension schemes and we were not able to take any immediate action. From 1st August 1977 this was no longer the case, and we were able to consider implementing the Review Body's recommendations.
At this point, I should like to say a little about the Government's general approach to the Review Body's report. We have accepted all the recommendations as a package. I am sure that there are several additional changes which hon. Members might have wished to see in the Bill but which the Review Body did not recommend or even specifically reject. My right hon. Friend the Leader of the House has received a number of proposals of this kind. One can, of course, think of many ways of adding to the benefits of any pension scheme, and not least the parliamentary scheme.
Many of these suggestions are, at least on the face of them, attractive. An example is the thought that some improve-

ment might be made in the benefits for dependent children. But I am sure that hon. Members would agree that we are always in a difficult position when it comes to determining our own conditions of service. It is reasonable that our conditions should match those of comparable occupations in the public service and elsewhere. On the other hand, we naturally want to avoid any suggestions of self-interest or over-generosity to ourselves.
There is great advantage, therefore, in our being able to refer these matters to the Top Salaries Review Body. In this way we can ensure that improvements in the scheme have regard to the overall level of benefits under it and that they are introduced only after careful costing and thorough research by an independent body. I am sure that this arrangement works well and to the advantage both of Members and of the taxpayer. It is for this reason that the Government are reluctant to depart from the Top Salaries Review Body's recommendations, particularly when a proposal put to them by hon. Members and others has been specifically rejected. We have no wish to weaken the Review Body's standing in these matters. Indeed, I should like to take this opportunity to express our appreciation to Lord Boyle and his colleagues for their work in this difficult field. One does not lightly enter the dense thickets of the legislation on the parliamentary pension scheme.
The main provisions of the Bill are, I think, by now fairly familiar to hon Members, and in view of the lateness of the hour I am sure that the House will not wish me to dwell now on the minor administrative provisions in the Bill. I shall, therefore, confine myself to describing the five main improvements introduced by the Bill, all of which do no more than bring the basic scheme for Members of the House of Commons up to the level of public service pension schemes generally.
The improvements in the Bill will make no difference to the basic pensions of Members, with the exception of the small group of present Members who served in the House between 1949 and 1955. The changes that the Bill makes are designed primarily to assist the dependants of Members and those Members who find themselves in particularly


difficult personal circumstances—for example, serious ill health. The ill health retirement provisions are almost identical with those which have been available to civil servants since 1972.
The first main improvement, contained in Clause 1 of the Bill, is an option, to be exercised at the end of a Parliament, for Members with 25 years' service in the House to retire at age 62 with the full pension they have accrued to date—that is, without any actuarial diminution such as is done in the case of hon. Members who retire early, at the age of 60, under the present scheme.
The Review Body noted that some other pension schemes with a retirement age of 65 contained provision for early retirement on pension accrued to date. They considered that the present option for MPs to take an actuarially reduced pension from age 60 onwards imposed a heavy financial burden but that a general reduction in the retiring age of the scheme to, say, 60 would lead to few Members being able to accrue a full pension by the age of retirement. The Review Body concluded, on balance, that retirement at age 62 should be permitted at the end of a Parliament for Members with at least 25 years service in the House. This is, I am sure, a recommendation which will be widely welcomed.
Clause 2, which is very important, provides an option for Members to retire early on grounds of ill health with their reckonable service enhanced in certain circumstances. In all cases the Member must satisfy the Trustees that he ceased to be a Member as a direct consequence of his ill health, which was such as would prevent him from performing adequately the duties of a Member of the House of Commons. This is, we believe, a reasonable test for the Trustees to apply. Under Clauses 3 and 4, current members of the supplementary scheme who retire on grounds of ill health will be eligible to receive an early pension, but without enhancement of reckonable service—that is, confined to the Members' scheme. The same will apply to former participants in either scheme who retire from work on grounds of ill health after leaving Parliament.
The third main change is in Clause 9, which permits the Lord President by order to provide for the purchase of added years of reckonable service, at full cost to

the Member, by periodical contributions from salary or by lump-sum purchase. Work on the preparation of this order is well advanced and it will embody all the Review Body's particular recommendations for the scheme. I hope that an early draft of the order can be made available to hon. Members who are interested before we reach Committee stage on the Bill. The provision applies to any Member serving at the passing of the Act.
Clauses 6 and 7 of the Bill seek to introduce improvements in the arrangements for widows' and dependants' pensions payable in respect of Members of the House of Commons in service after the passing of the Bill. Where a former Member dies after retirement, his widow will receive not less than the full amount of his pension for three months before she begins to receive the normal half-rate widow's pension.
Similarly, where a Member who had qualified for a pension dies in service his widow will receive not less than his full pay as a Member for a period of three months. If he was under 65 when he died, the widow's continuing pension after the three-month period will be calculated on the basis of enhanced reckon-able service, as if her husband had retired on grounds of ill health. Clause 7 provides a limited short-term benefit for widows and children when a Member dies in service who had not qualified for a pension.
Clause 10(3) provides for Members actually in service after the passing of the Act to receive an extension of back service credit from 10 years—as at present—to 15 years, for services as an MP before the introduction of the parliamentary pension scheme in 1964. The Review Body considered carefully whether all previous service should be reckonable for pension purposes. It concluded that this would not be appropriate but that a limited increase could be justified in the context of the package as a whole.
To pay for these changes, there has naturally to be some increase in contributions both by Members themselves and by the Exchequer. The total cost of the changes provided for in the Bill will be about £120,000 a year. This will be met partly by an increase in Members' contributions from 5 per cent. to 6 per cent. of pensionable salary and partly by an


Exchequer contribution of some £60,000 a year. There is no increase in contributions under the supplementary scheme for office holders, because the great majority of the improved benefits attach only to the basic scheme for Members.
Some hon. Members may be interested in the effect of Clause 14, which may appear particularly complicated. The main purpose of that clause is to bring about a small improvement in the position of those who retire from the House of Commons and then hold offices in the House of Lords with fairly low salaries. At present they may not receive any part of their pension earned as a Member of the House of Commons, as long as they hold office in the House of Lords. Clause 14 would allow some or all of their pension to be paid up to the level where pension and salary together equal the current salary of a Back-Bench Member of Parliament. They will not, therefore, lose financially on moving from this House to take up an office in the House of Lords.
I am fairly sure, too, that I shall be asked why the Bill does not seek to improve the arrangements for severance pay for Members of this House. The answer is that severance pay is not a benefit payable under the Parliamentary Pension Scheme and it is, therefore, outside the scope of the Bill. But my right hon. Friend has already informed the House that there will be an early opportunity to discuss this matter during the forthcoming debate on Members' pay.

Mr. Thomas Swain: How does the Minister explain the fact that anyone who is retiring at the next General Election and who has been in the House 19, 20 or 21 years will, if he wants to buy service of 10 years, have to find a sum of roughly £4,260? This means that it will be more than three years before he gets one penny benefit from his investment.

Mr. Smith: There is a genuine difficulty here. I am afraid that to get an enhanced benefit under the pension scheme there must be some method by which it is paid for. In the case that my hon. Friend mentioned, if it is paid for by a lump sum obviously it will be very expensive. But we do not see how it is possible to make such a radical difference

to the parliamentary pensions scheme to allow extra year's service to be added without payment for it. I am afraid that that is an unfortunate consequence of the parliamentary scheme having to stay roughly in line with other public service schemes. Some Members who would be retiring—not particularly those to whom my hon. Friend referred, because I think that he was careful to say 19, 20 or 21 years' service—and who were here for many years prior to 1964 when we did not have a scheme would get the extra five years. This is a considerable benefit, for which no extra contribution will be required. That is a genuine attempt to try to make up for the fact that a number of Members with very long service in the House have only 10 years reckoned for the period before 1964, although they may have spent a very long period of time in the House before that. It is in the nature of a compromise, but many of these things have to be compromises.

Mr. Kenneth Baker: The Minister said that the ideas enshrined in the Early-Day Motion on severance pay were outside the scope of the Bill, but he added that the Leader of the House had said that the House would have an opportunity to discuss the matter. May I press the Minister a little further on that topic? Will the House have an opportunity not only to discuss severance pay but actually to decide upon it? The House would welcome the opportunity to make a clear decision whether it wants to support the sentiments in the Early-Day Motion.

Mr. Smith: I am sure that my right hon. Friend the Leader of the House will consider the hon. Gentleman's suggestion, but it is not appropriate for me on this pensions Bill to speculate what might be possible in respect of Member's pay and severance pay, which are quite other matters. I thought it only fair to the House to point to the limits of this Bill, which would not go so far as to allow amendments in Committee on severance pay. I have no doubt my right hon. Friend will reflect on the hon. Gentleman's remarks.
I should like to end on a more general note. In opening the debate I said that this was a complex and difficult Bill, as hon. Members who have read it will appreciate. I apologise for the difficulty


in sometimes understanding its provisions. I am afraid that, because it was a difficult Bill to frame, it has taken some time to produce. I know that hon. Members have been concerned about the time the Bill has taken to emerge into the light of day, but those who have experience of pensions matters will know that this is an area in which no prizes are awarded for being 90 per cent. right. Small mistakes can have major consequences and can be seriously damaging to individuals. Therefore, particular care must be taken in framing legislation.
I should, however, like to leave with the House the reflection that our pensions scheme is probably one of the most complicated in the United Kingdom, if not in the world. It is carefully tailored to meet the difficulties and uncertainties of parliamentary life, and it is composed of two separate schemes woven tightly together for Members of Parliament and office holders. As an example of the drafting difficulties this creates, the ill-health provisions in the Bill have to allow for 14 different permutations of service in the House of Commons and the House of Lords.
After the Bill is passed, the parliamentary pension scheme will be governed by at least five separate Acts of Parliament as well as the major order, to be made in the next few days, modifying the scheme to contract us out of the new State pension arrangements. The background reading list necessary to understand the present Bill runs to at least 10 items. We should, I think, consider whether it really remains sensible to attempt to embody in primary legislation a scheme of this complexity, which will inevitably need fairly frequent amendment to keep it up to date. The time may be coming—as it did for the Civil Service in 1972—when the scheme needs to be consolidated not in a further Act but in a system of rules which can be adjusted rather more easily. This is a point for the longer term, but it is an important one on which the Government would welcome the views of the House, particularly in this Second Reading debate.

Mr. Tim Rathbone: The Minister mentioned the establishment of rules for the future of the pension fund and suggested that many Members would welcome that, but it would be inequitable if those rules embraced a particular sys-

tem of pensions based on a hypothetical salary, which is the case now and which is unique to the House of Commons, when that system is not available to the rest of the country. I hope that the Minister does not have in mind the introduction of rules on those lines.

Mr. Smith: The hon. Member is straying on to a matter on which there is an item in his name on the Order Paper. There are certain oddities about our situation. There is another oddity on which the hon. Gentleman may reflect. There are a number of people who are being recommended to take a higher salary and who are voluntarily taking a lower one. That is the source of one difficulty. It is a point that causes a great deal of concern to hon. Members. I understand that there are some other public servants who get pensions based on a higher reckonable salary. Some civil servants are in the same category as hon. Members. They had a salary increase recommended but it was not paid. The appropriate analogy for the parliamentary scheme is other public service schemes.
The question of rules will have to be considered carefully, but it is not a matter which concerns us tonight. Hon. Members will realise the difficulties. I was casting a fly on the waters in the hope of receiving general endorsement for the proposition that we should move in a different way in future.
As I have said, I do not at this time of night wish to weary the House with an explanation of all the considerable detail of the Bill. That can properly be left for Committee, when I hope to provide background notes on the effect of the various clauses to assist hon. Members who may be interested, in the hope that that may clarify some of the complications that appear on the face of the Bill.
I hope that I have satisfactorily explained the main purpose and features of the Bill. It is no more than a modest but useful measure. I commend it to the House and ask hon. Members to give it a Second Reading.

Several Hon. Members: rose—

Mr. Speaker: Order. I should have told the House that I have not selected the amendment in the name of the hon. Member for Somerset, North (Mr. Dean).

10.36 p.m.

Mr. Francis Pym: The House will be relieved that the Government have eventually introduced the Bill and grateful to them for doing so. The House will appreciate the way that the right hon. Gentleman—I take this opportunity of congratulating him on the fact that I may now refer to him in that way—has introduced it. He will find that many points of doubt and criticism will be raised in the debate.
The Top Salaries Review Body was appointed in January 1975—three and a half years ago—and reported in July 1976 —two years ago—on pensions and some other matters. Many hon. Members feel that the delay between that report and the Bill has been unnecessary and regrettable. The Minister explained that there were pay policy restrictions in 1976, but they were created by the Government. They released themselves from that constriction in August 1977—nearly a year ago—and we have got the Bill only towards the end of June 1978.
The Bill gives effect in full to chapter 3 of the Eighth Report and we welcome that fact that the Government have responded in that way, but after two or three years circumstances have already changed. That will be reflected in later speeches. Those years have seen the greatest degree of inflation ever known in this country-15 per cent. last year, 17 per cent. the year before and 25 per cent. the year before that. At times of such inflation, pensions naturally assume greater importance because it is retired people who are the hardest hit. After such a gap in time, it is no wonder that new views and attitudes will emerge in the debate, criticising to some extent the Bill before us.
Inflation was the inspiration of certainly the second half of the amendment of my hon. Friend the Member for Somerset, North (Mr. Dean) which was not selected. Obviously, hon. Members who retired by 1964 without any pension are among the hardest-hit members of the community. More than any other group, they will be feeling the pinch and, like any other organisation, we are naturally concerned about our colleagues who retired in those circumstances.
In the light of the events I have described, the Review Body might well take

a different view if it were in session now—that is to say, sitting two or three years after its deliberations, which were before the dramatic expansion of inflation.
The trouble over pensions and the criticism that I think will be lodged arises, at least in part, from the illogicality of paying Members of Parliament one salary and regarding their salary as another figure for pension purposes. We know that there is a notional figure for pension purposes, which is an anomaly. The anomaly has arisen because the Government have failed adequately to remunerate Members of Parliament. I believe that that is the view of the House. Clearly they have not done so in accordance with the recommendations of the Review Body on Top Salaries. The debate is not about the salaries of Members of Parliament, but it cannot be denied that salaries and pensions are inextricably connected.
Clause 12 of the Bill increases the contribution that Members will make to their pensions. There will be some element of controversy about whether it is fair or right that the contribution should be increased from 5 per cent. to 6 per cent. Presumably the notional salary will be increased as well. I imagine that that will take place in a Bill or order relating to Members' salaries.
If the contribution made by Members is to increase, presumably the notional salary will have to be increased. That will exacerbate the criticism that is felt by hon. Members on both sides of the House about the present arrangement. The first half of the amendment of my hon. Friend the Member for Somerset, North refers to that anomaly, which derives from the fact that the Government, to put it bluntly and crudely, have funked acting on the recommendations of the Review Body.

Mr. Robert Mellish: All Governments have.

Mr. Pym: No, that is not true. In 1970–71 the Conservative Government accepted the recommendations it full and put them before the House. The House accepted in full the rise for Members of Parliament and Ministers. There was no deviation from that.

Mr. Swain: Is the right hon. Gentlemen aware that before the 1970 General


Election there was an understanding between both major parties that whichever party won the election would implement the Lawrence Committee's report?

Mr. Pym: That is as may be.

Mr. Swain: It is so.

Mr. Pym: It is as may be. The right hon. Member for Bermondsey (Mr. Mellish) sought to suggest that no Government had done it. I was saying as a matter of historical fact that one Government had done it. I happen to know that the Labour Opposition at the time thought that the Government's acceptance was entirely right. They were slightly envious that a Government had had the courage to do that.
The anomaly to which I was referring derives from the fact that the Government have resolutely refused to act upon the recommendations of the Review Body. They have done so in respect of the 1976 recommendations, but not without a considerable degree of pressure. I do not think that it was volunteered. I know that my right hon. Friend the Member for Taunton (Mr. du Cann) has been active in trying to persuade the Government to take action, and no doubt other hon. Friends and Labour Members have been no less assiduous in bringing pressure to bear upon the Government.
We know that the salaries of Members of Parliament are soon to be reviewed. There will be great interest in the House about how the Government decide to handle the matter. How is the present anomaly to be adjusted? It is appropriate to draw to the attention of the House what the report of the Review Body on Top Salaries, Cmnd. Paper 6574, says about Members' salaries. Paragraph 4 states:
we feel bound to express our concern at the consequences of continuing to undervalue the demands on those elected to govern the country…we are perturbed that, whereas our recommendations for increased allowances have been accepted in full, Members' salaries have been increased by little more than one-third of what we recommended. We consider this imbalance between salaries and allowances to be wrong in principle and unwise in practice. We are also perturbed by the establishment of two different levels of salary for pension purposes and other purposes…The only way to avoid these and other difficulties…is for Members to vote themselves a realistic salary.

That is relevant to the Bill, because for pension purposes we have a notional salary which would not exist if the salary were at the level recommended in the report. The Minister said that it was a good thing that the Government were able to refer such matters to such a body. I think that those were his words. Indeed, he referred to it, but he is accepting the recommendations only in part. It is all very well to take credit for the recommendations which are accepted, but the right hon. Gentleman cannot then argue that it is equally reasonable not to accept the other recommendations.
I certainly feel that constitutional implications underlie the level of remuneration for Members of Parliament. Obviously I cannot go into this matter tonight, but it is significant. The words in the report, one chapter of which we are accepting, are extremely important and highly relevant to the consideration that we shall have to give to Members' salaries whenever the Government bring forward the legislation.
I should like to raise three matters concerning the Bill. First, I want to draw attention to Clauses 6 and 7 and the distinction between widows and dependent widowers for certain benefits. I understand the background and precedents in other pension schemes, but I think that many hon. Members will feel that this division is, to some extent at least, inappropriate in this age of nondiscrimination.
Secondly, I should like to refer to Clause 2, particularly subsection (8)(b). This clause deals with the ill health of Members:
III-health pensions based on service as a Member.
That subsection will apply only if the Member or ex-Member can satisfy the Trustees
that on the day of the poll in that election his ill-health was such as would prevent him from performing adequately the duties of a Member of the House of Commons.
When people get on in life, illness and indisposition are to some extent variable. I wonder whether it is right to say that it must be on polling day, and only on polling day, that the illness is to be acknowledged. It seems entirely human and natural that a Member or an ex-Member could be fit on polling day but not very fit on the eve of the poll or on


the day after the poll. It seems curious phraseology to say that medical certification is required
on the day of the poll".
I suspect that some amendment there might be considered with advantage, fairness and humanity.
Thirdly, there is the question of pre-1964 service. I particularly welcome the extension of the number of pre-1964 years of service which can be counted towards service from 10 to 15. I am sure that that is right. But I am equally sure that there will be particular concern about those MPs who retired before or shortly after that date. They are small in number, but they must be in very straitened circumstances now.
The report, in paragraph 34, states:
If it were the desire of Parliament as a whole that some additional provision should be made for those Members who had retired before the introduction of the present pension scheme, it might be appropriate to give consideration to an arrangement in parallel to the State pension arrangements for the over-80's.
I think that this matter will have to be dealt with in Committee. I am not sure whether Parliament will think it right to confine it to the over-80's, although no doubt some among that small number of ex-Members will be over 80. I am sure that hon. Members will wish to probe this area more deeply in Committee. Indeed, that is the purpose of the amendment tabled by my hon. Friend the Member for Somerset, North.
Those are three comparatively minor matters. I am sure that hon. Members on both sides of the House will wish to raise many others.
I welcome the fact that at long last the Government have introduced the Bill and accepted in full the recommendations in the report. It is a matter for regret that there has been such delay, particularly as the economy, inflation and the general social situation have changed so dramatically. I am sure that this will have an effect on what lion. Members feel would today be appropriate.
I think that the Review Body on Top Salaries might take a different view if it were sitting now. I do not know whether the Government intend to ask the Review Body to review the matter yet again. But it would seem highly desirable to ask it to look again not only at pensions

but at Members' salaries, because everything has changed so much.
I think that it is an error for us to get behind in the adjustments that we make in our salaries and arrangements from time to time. It would be wise for us to keep up to date, and I hope that the Government, who do not have so much longer to live, will, as long as they live, bear in mind their full responsibility as a Government for deciding what arrangements for Members' salaries and pensions shall be made and ensure that we do not allow ourselves to get as out of date as I believe we are.

10.52 p.m.

Mr. Cledwyn Hughes: The purpose of my brief intervention is to thank my right hon. Friend the Leader of the House and the Government for honouring the commitment that my right hon. Friend gave the House on several occasions that the recommendations of the Boyle Report would be implemented. I, too, congratulate my right hon. Friend the Minister of State both on the manner in which he introduced the Bill and on the honour that was conferred upon him. It augurs well for the future that his first speech as a Privy Councillor was a short one.
I support my right hon. Friend warmly in what he said about the need for a consolidation measure at the earliest possible time to deal with the pension arrangements of hon. Members. The Bill will give effect to chapter 3 of the Eighth Report of the Review Body, and it remedies serious defects in the existing scheme. Clauses 6, 7 and 8, in so far as they help widows and children of deceased Members, are especially to be welcomed. I hope that the Bill will be passed speedily so that this part of it will become effective as soon as possible. It is very much in the minds of right hon. and hon. Members that many of our right hon. and hon. Friends have passed away and that their widows have suffered because this measure was not in force.
No one could argue that the Bill is over-generous. Nor should it be. But there is a need for people to realise that the position of Members of Parliament is quite different from that of people in most other occupations and professions. For example, the tenure of office of Members of Parliament is uncertain. A Members


frequently gives up the position in life for which he has been trained, but he may serve in this House only for a short time. It may be argued that a Member goes into his position in this House with his eyes open. That is true. That is what some of the newspapers say. Yet Members of Parliament should he treated with some consideration. A Member cannot hope to achieve a pension in the region of half pay, such as civil servant or a local authority employee can expect. The average Member serves for about 15 years, and that shows that the average pension must be modest.
Members of Parliament are unable to plan in advance as people in other walks of life are able to do. That is for the simple and obvious reason that we do not know when a General Election may occur. A Parliament may last for 18 months or less, or it may run for the full five-year term. Members may therefore have no alternative but to continue well beyond the age of 65 because they cannot afford to retire before that age, although they would often like to do so and their wives would be even more glad if they were to retire at the right time. This cannot be a satisfactory state of affairs. I hope that the Review Body will be asked to look at this point carefully in due course.
This may not be the appropriate moment to discuss the salaries of hon. Members, although the right hon. Member for Cambridgeshire (Mr. Pym) referred to the matter. Of course, there is never a proper time to discuss the salaries of hon. Members in this House. That is the reason why I belive, and have believed for a very long time, that the question should be taken out of our hands.
I hope, however, that the leaders of all political parties in the House can agree that the least that can be done is to reactivate the Review Body at once after the next General Election, whatever the result of the election may be. There are many other matters to be looked at. One of them, if I may say so in passing, is your own position, Mr. Speaker. But I shall not embarrass you by going into any details about that at this stage.
The Bill is an important step forward. It does no more than implement recom-

mendations which were made to the House two years ago. Its cost is negligible. I wish it a speedy passage.

10.56 p.m.

Mr. Edward du Cann: I agree with every word that the right hon. Member for Anglesey (Mr. Hughes) has said. Since I have pressed the Leader of the House as hard as anyone to introduce a measure to implement the plain and clear recommendations of Boyle, and I think that the right hon. Member for Anglesey and I, separately and together, have seen the Leader of the House some half a dozen times, perhaps, about this matter, I would like my first words publicly, as it were, to be of congratulations and best thanks to him. I add a further personal word to the Leader of the House. That is to say how good of him it is to be here with us this evening for the debate on this matter.
This may be a complex matter, as the Minister of State has said, but it is, in fact, just a simple updating of our pension arrangements. It is no more than that. It is giving us, after some considerable delay, a fair deal in this matter. I think that it is right to say very clearly that it is a beginning, and it is only a beginning.
As the Minister very rightly said, it would be a good thing if we could consolidate all this pension legislation and set up some method of easier handling. I entirely agree with that.
There are two matters for discussion. The first is this system and the alterations that it makes to the calculation of pensions, the contributions, the rights, how dependants are treated, exceptions and the rest. Secondly, there is the level of remuneration upon which pensions are based. As my right hon. Friend the Member for Cambridgeshire (Mr. Pym) said, these matters are inextricably interrelated. Both are relevant, because one cannot have a pension without a scheme and rules and, of course, the actual amount that is paid out by way of pension needs a yardstick from which to flow—that is to say, the salary. The question to which the House should address itself in some respect in this matter is on what salary level pensions should be based.
It is necessary to go back a little into history. In 1971 there were the first references to the new Review Body. There had been no increase in Members' salaries since the implementation of the Lawrence recommendations in 1964. Then, in 1972, the Boyle recommendations were implemented in full, with the good will of the whole House—eight years later, after eight years of delay. In 1972, the Review Body on Top Salaries, the Boyle Committee, began a fresh and comprehensive review of Members' and Ministers' salaries. It was from that that the proposal flowed that Members of Parliament should be paid a salary of £8,000 a year. In 1977 the theoretical pay rate for pension became £8,208, although, as has already been stated, the basic pay of a Member of Parliament is very much less than that.
As the right hon. Member for Anglesey said, our own remuneration always seems to be a difficult and embarrassing subject for us to discuss. I am not altogether clear as to why that should be so. It is made much more difficult, I suggest, by the long delays that seem always to supervene between reviews. It is made very much more difficult by the low salary levels from which the discussions begin. And it has been made much more difficult still, I say in all seriousness to the Leader of the House, by the tendency that we have lately developed to improve the allowances because we think that the public, by and large, will agree to those, while still keeping pay very much lower than it ought to be.
I would say that this is a House of Commons matter and that it is for the House of Commons to debate and decide it. I am fortunate to earn a living outside the House, and it is perhaps easier for me to speak and to act freely than it might be for others who are Members of this House and who are not so fortunately placed. Any politician is a man of opinions. I am certain of my own, which I hope the House will approve and which, I think, have a bearing on these matters.
First, I believe it to be discreditable for this House of Commons to tolerate the establishment of committees or commissions to make recommendations on subjects on which we already have all the facts. Secondly, when those commissions

or committees, however they are appointed, have reported in good faith, I think it is contemptible that their recommendations are not accepted because, for example, it is not convenient for the Government of the day. Thirdly, my experience in this place has taught me that it is usually not reasonable to wait for Ministers, of any Administration, to take an initiative. Waiting for Ministers is like waiting for Godot, and he, you will remember, Mr. Speaker, never came.
The position nine months ago, the period of human gestation, was this. We had a clear recommendation from Boyle on the pensions of Members of Parliament. I do not believe that we had the least prospect of legislation. I believe that it was necessary to press the Leader of the House, for this was something that could easily be done without embarrassment to the Government of the day and totally within Government pay policy. For those reasons—and I think that this should be said—the executive of the 1922 Committee and the executive of the Parliamentary Labour Party, under the leadership of the right hon. Member for Anglesey met and talked and considered the matter and decided to make joint representations to the Leader of the House. I have already paid tribute to the right hon. Gentleman for the typical courtesy with which we were always received and for his eventually accepting our recommendations. I hope the House will think that co-operation between the two main parties in this House is healthy and may be useful in other respects. But in my view, for what my opinion is worth, it is a beginning, and only a beginning.
I should never argue that no bounds should be set either to the pretensions of Back Benchers—we are hardly noted, any of us, for our modesty—or that the price that the nation must pay for democracy should be unlimited. There is much to be said for public examples of modesty or restraint on the part of Members of Parliament. We have a duty to set an example, and it is undoubted.
But what are the facts? Since 1964, a date that I have already mentioned, 14 years ago, Members' salaries have fallen considerably behind the general movements in remuneration and in prices. A recent parliamentary Question asked


what the 1965 basic salary would be now —I am speaking of a Question asked in September 1977—to have the same purchasing power as in 1965. The salary then was £5,250. To give the same purchasing power, the salary at that date would have had to be £10,264. The Library—our diligent researches—worked out that the figure of £8,000 on which our pensions are based, recommended in 1975, by Boyle, would have been £10,883 by the end of 1977. I suppose that if one extrapolates the figure and takes it to the end of the year it will certainlyy be over £11,000, and probably more like double the amount that Members of Parliament are receiving today.
While we rejoice at the Bill, this updating, this fairness as I have described it, let us be under no illusion. The figure on which the pension is being based in future is far lower than in justice and fairness it ought to be.
By international standards, and not merely as a question of what is right according to some yardstick which was considered and fixed by the Boyle Committee a year or two ago, the same applies to pay, only the contrast is more marked. As The Times wrote a little while ago, by international standards we are badly paid—two-thirds of the amount paid to a Member of Parliament in Canada, Italy and Germany, about half that paid in France and Australia, less than half that paid in Holland, and one-third of that paid in the United States. It is not surprising that The Guardian describes our remuneration as "inadequate" and says that it
ought to be substantially increased.
the Economist calls us "poor relations", and according to the Sunday Times we are
the worst paid in the Western World.
The late hon. Member for Wycombe, Sir John Hall, who took a great interest in these subjects, tragically died before he was able to see the fruits of some of his work. If right hon. and hon. Members will be diligent enough to look back to a Question which he asked on 24th January 1977, they will see just how bad the situation has been hitherto in regard to pensions. The Lord President of the Council gave him a long and detailed answer of comparatives at that time.
There is an unanswerable case for Members of Parliament to be remunerated properly. There is no reason on earth why Members of this House should be underpaid and as badly underpaid as they are at present. Salaries in this place should be adequate—not so big as to be a tremendous attraction, nor so light as to involve hardship, as I am bound to say is currently the case for some active Members of Parliament, for some pensioners and for their widows. I think that the country should know that.
Though we may rejoice about the Bill, I do not believe that we are doing a proper job even now. I do not think that the Bill is complete. The right hon. Member for Anglesey asked a very important question which bears on Clause 16, which provides for a reduction in lieu of income tax to be made in refunds of contributions to former Prime Ministers, Speakers of the House of Commons and Lord Chancellors. If the Leader of the House replies to this debate, I hope that he will be good enough to tell the House whether he thinks that the arrangements made today for these old and great servants of our nation are appropriate and adequate. The researches which I have made indicate that they are not, and here is a matter which I believe should be looked into.
None the less, I hope that the House will welcome the Bill. Amendments are possible. Whether it will be possible to make the amendment to which my hon. Friend the Member for St. Marylebone (Mr. Baker) referred—what might be called the Lomas amendment covered by Early-Day Motion No. 252, which has now been signed by 217 Members of Parliament—I do not know. But this is a beginning.
If I might recommend the next stage, I remind the House that the Leader of the House has indicated that some time soon, perhaps next week, there will be an announcement about increases in Members' salaries. I echo warmly what the right hon. Member for Anglesey said. We must take this subject out of the political arena altogether if we can without in any way resiling from the duty that we have to decide the matter.
Pay is in a muddle, and we all know it. This Bill is a muddle because it is based on a notional sum, as my right hon. Friend the Member for Cambridgeshire


said. Every responsible commentator knows that the subject is a muddle. It must be possible to establish a proper rate for the work that we do here. I echo the suggestion made to the Leader of the House by the right hon. Member for Anglesey that the Boyle Committee should be re-established immediately and asked continuously between now and the next General Election to update its thinking and assessment of the position.
I hope that my right hon. Friends in the leadership of the Conservative Party will echo what my right hon. Friend the Member for Cambridgeshire said about the need for a commitment on the part of both sides of the House to accept what the Boyle Committee recommends without equivocation in the name of common sense and in the name, above all, of endeavouring to ensure that democracy works effectively in that its handmaidens —since I am not allowed to use a term which imputes sex, perhaps I should say "hand persons"—are looked after in reasonable fashion by those whom we endeavour to serve.

11.10 p.m.

Mr. G. R. Strauss: I agree very largely with the views expressed by the right hon. Member for Taunton (Mr. du Cann). We are discussing a pensions Bill, and a great deal of what he said was concerned with pay, which does not really arise in this debate. But I agree entirely as probably every other hon. Member agrees, that the pay which hon. Members get is inadequate and that it was very unfortunate that the Boyle Report was not accepted in full.
We know the reason, and it was very understandable. With the climate of the time, if the pay of Members of Parliament had been increased substantially there would have been an outcry against Members taking unfair advantage in voting themselves a substantial increase while the working people, under the various standstill arrangements that were in operation, were unable to do so for themselves. The political effect would have been serious—I think we all realised that —and, therefore, the Government felt that they had very good reason for saying that, for the time being there should be a limit on the increase.

Mr. Michael English: Surely my right hon. Friend will

recollect that the £8,000 which Boyle proposed that we should have was proposed before this current pay policy. We have not yet received it, although the pay policy in nowise prevents us from doing so.

Mr. Strauss: I do not think that that in any way destroys the case I am making. If at that time the Government had increased our pay to £8,000, there would have been a veritable outcry, and the political consequences, and the consequences in the trade union movement and in the economy as a whole, might have been serious.
I agree fully with the right hon. Member for Taunton that there should be agreement now, before the General Election, by all parties in the House, that whatever the Boyle Committee recommends in its next review should be accepted by whatever Government are elected. That is the only way out of the difficulty. But it is for the leaders of the parties to decide whether they are to agree to that.
I agree also that the pensions paid are wholly inadequate and nothing like as good as they should be. I am Chairman of the Managing Trustees of the Pension Fund, and it is our duty to administer the two funds that exist to the best of our ability. I do not think that there is any criticism that we have not done it well.
But our other job is to see that Members of Parliament, as far as our advice carries weight, are receiving proper pensions and where there are anomalies in the pension system we recommend changes. The Trustees have gone into this matter thoroughly over the last two years, and they have drawn up a number of proposals which they have submitted to the Boyle Committee proposing changes which we thought would be acceptable. In other words, we have thought it quite pointless at the present stage to go beyond the principles which apply to the public service pension schemes, because that plainly would not be acceptable to Parliament and I doubt whether it would be acceptable to the public.
Therefore, we have limited our proposals to improvements within the public service pension principles which are in operation. Within those limits we


have made a number of proposals, and all the proposals before the House this evening are those which have been suggested to the Boyle Committee by the Managing Trustees of the Pension Fund.
I am glad that the Boyle Committee has accepted all these proposals. I am also glad that with one exception, which I shall deal with in a moment, the Government have accepted all the Boyle proposals. One proposal which was put forward by my Committee was not accepted by Boyle. That was very regrettable, and I hope that further consideration will be given to it. The Leader of the House knows what that proposal is. We suggested that pensions given to children of deceased Members were not adequate and should be brought up to the standard which exists in the public service pension schemes. We felt that pensions in respect of children should be quite substantially increased in order to bring them into line with existing pensions in the public service. In other words, the pension for each child should be not one-eighth of the eligible pension but one-quarter, and it should be limited to two children.
That might make a difference of several hundred pounds for a widow with young children. That is not an unreasonable request, because it is already in existence elsewhere. Apart from that, we must thank the Government for accepting the Boyle Committee's report, and we must thank the Boyle Committee for accepting all the views put forward by the Trustees.
I should like to emphasise that all our recommendations were unanimous. Equally, with regard to those recommendations which were not put forward, and which some hon. Members think we ought to have put forward, it was also unanimous that they should not be put forward, because in the circumstances it was thought that they were unreasonable. Therefore, the proposals before us tonight are the fruits of all-party recommendation and as such should be accepted.
In saying that, I agree completely that they are inadequate at the moment. I hope that the next time the Boyle Committee meets it will change the pensions system to something which is very much better. Having two tiers—£8,000 for pensions and £6,250 for salaries—

is utterly ridiculous. That should be altered. I do not know whether it is generally appreciated that Members who retired in 1974 get susbtantially higher pensions than Members who retire now. That is a ridiculous situation. All that requires looking into.
Meanwhile, all that the House can do is to say that at present pensions are inadequate, that there must be improvements and new proposals must be put forward in the next Parliament which I hope the Boyle Committee and whichever party are in power will accept.

11.18 p.m.

Mr. Paul Dean: I rise to oppose the Bill. In doing so, I recognise that I shall be expressing a minority view which will receive no enthusiasm in any part of the House. I realise, too, that there have been close consultations within the House before the Bill was produced. Therefore, in that sense it is very much an agreed measure.
My opposition was expressed in a motion on the Order Paper. I am grateful to my right hon. Friend the Member for Cambridgeshire (Mr. Pym) for the measure of support which he gave to the two main grounds for my opposition, which are expressed in the motion in the following terms. That the Bill
first, continues to base pension rights on notional pay much higher than actual pay, thus giving Members and Ministers pension privileges which are denied to the rest of the community; and second, makes no provision for Members or the widows and dependents of Members who retired before October 1964.
This motion is somewhat similar to a motion which a number of my hon. Friends and I had on the Order Paper and which was discussed when we last debated parliamentary pensions in 1976.
I should first declare an interest in pensions matters. I am a trustee of a number of pension schemes. Secondly, I in no way oppose the pension improvements in the Bill. Indeed, only recently have we begun to provide for ourselves pensions which are adequate by modern standards or are comparable with those in other jobs. As for pay, that remains wholly inadequate for the hours we put in and for the hazards of the job.
So, in opposing the Bill, I am not saying that we are overpaid or over-pensioned. I am saying that we are open


to criticism for adopting artificial pension devices to try to make up for poor pay.

Mr. Mellish: I respect the hon. Gentleman for what he is saying, but is not the logic of his argument that he should not oppose the Bill now but should try to amend it in Committee? That is the normal way.

Mr. Dean: I am grateful. As I develop my arguments, I may be able to invite the right hon. Gentleman's support for some amendments which I will put down in Committee, if it is possible to get them in order in the light of the Long Title.
I want to deal first with the position of those who retired before October 1964 and of their widows and dependants. They are entitled to no parliamentary pension. We have to remember that they served at a time when pay was even more inadequate than it is today, when allowances were small or even non-existent—there was no secretarial allowance, for instance—and many of the expenses of the job, which in most other jobs are met by the employer, had to be met wholly by our former colleagues in those days.
How many of those former colleagues are in straitened circumstances today? How many of them, having served their country and their constituencies for many years, are in poverty? How many of them, indeed, perhaps served as Cabinet Ministers and are in poverty today? How many of them are wondering whether Parliament has forgotten them when they see us improving pensions for ourselves but doing nothing for them?
The last time that we discussed these matters, in 1976, I asked how many former Members and Members' widows are receiving help from the Members Fund.
The Lord President replied:
There are…24 former Members and 33 widows of deceased Members who are not eligible for pension from the pension scheme but who receive grants from the House of Commons Members Fund."—[Official Report, 12th July 1976; Vol. 915, c. 11.]
I hope that those figures will be updated before the end of the debate.
It is a scandal that we should be debating improvements for ourselves tonight

when that number of our former colleagues and their widows have to go to a means-tested scheme to receive any assistance. Whatever the latest figures, I suspect that there are many others of our former colleagues who have not applied because they feel that it would be demeaning. I hope that at least we can get the facts on this.

Mr. Strauss: The answer to the question is that the numbers today are about the same as they were a year or two ago. It is a distortion to say that a number of older Members are in poverty. Those who apply—and anybody can apply—are treated with great sympathy. They can get from the Members Fund a substantial grant to take them right out of poverty, although they have contributed nothing. They are given considerable grants if they apply, and every application is treated with the greatest sympathy.

Mr. Dean: I am assured to hear that. But I still maintain that there is all the difference in the world between a pension as of right and one based on a means test, however sympathetically it may be administered and however generous the trustees of the means-tested scheme may be. There is a substantial difference between the two types of arrangements.

Mrs. Barbara Castle: Is the hon. Member asking that the statutory scheme—as of right—should be extended to those who did not contribute before that scheme was introduced? If so, is he not giving to these persons pension privileges that are denied to the rest of the community? Does not his amendment embody a contradiction?

Mr. Dean: I am grateful to the right hon. Lady, because I am coming to that point. I recognise that the Boyle Report recommended against bringing in those who retired before October 1964. I accept that the traditional approach to pension schemes has been that those not in service at the time should not benefit. I suggest to the House, however, that most modern precedents have been in the other direction.
When the pension schemes in which I am involved improve benefits to those who are serving, they almost always provide on an ad hoc basis some improvements


for those who retired earlier and who could not otherwise benefit from the new arrangements. I remember distinctly that when I was a Minister dealing with war pensions in a previous Government, on at least two occasion when we improved benefits under the war pensions scheme for those in service we also improved the benefits for those who had retired, however long they had been in retirement.

Mr. English: Some play has been made about Members who did not contribute before 1964. I think I am right in saying that they were not allowed to contribute. This puts a different complexion on the matter. Will the hon. Member explain the situation of civil servants who did not contribute before 1964 or before any other date?

Mr. Dean: I am grateful to the hon. Member for his help. Before coming to civil servants, I should like to turn to a much more effective analogy and a more convincing precedent in favour of my argument. It applies to our own contributory pension scheme.
We have already conceded the principle—this is my answer to the right hon. Member for Blackburn (Mrs. Castle)—that service before October 1964 can count for pension purposes and that the cost shall be borne wholly by public funds. In other words, there is to be no contribution by the Member concerned. It can count for pension purposes for those serving after 1964 even if they had a break in service and returned, say, in 1966. The Bill increases the pre-1964 service which can count for pension purposes from 10 to 15 years.
I submit that we now have a contrast that is even starker than it was before the Bill was introduced—namely, that existing Members who can count 15 years' service before October 1964 for pension purposes can have the whole of that met from public funds. On the other hand, we have those who retired before October 1964 who get no pension and can count no service before 1964. I suggest to the House that that is neither fair not equitable.
The Boyle Report, in paragraph 34, suggested a possible solution. It referred to another precedent—that of the over-80s pension introduced for people outside this House in 1970. I believe that a limited parliamentary pension as of right

for former Members and their widows at the age of 80 is the least we can do. I hope very much that, if it is possible to devise an amendment that is within the Long Title of the Bill, the Government will give it sympathetic consideration.
I submit that we should no longer go on improving pensions for ourselves without some recognition of the difficulties of our former colleagues who retired 14 years or more ago and who have suffered the full rigours of inflation on their savings, with no parliamentary pension to help them. I suggest that modern precedents are wholly in favour of some pension for them. The parliamentary supplementary benefit—for that is what it is—through the Members Fund is no longer good enough. I suggest that we dishonour our former colleagues and ourselves as long as we allow that situation to continue.
My second argument is that it seems to me wrong to base our pension rights on notional pay which is much higher than actual pay. Our actual pay is now £6,270 a year, but our pay for pension purposes is the Boyle recommendation, which has been added to in recent years to bring the figure to £8,208 a year. I suggest that in doing this we are providing for ourselves pension privileges that are denied to the rest of the community.
The Minister was able to make no more than generalised remarks. I ask him to quote any pension scheme which can go before the Inland Revenue and obtain this type of arrangement. It is a device to make up for poor pay. It is an understandable device, and I would not necessarily complain about it if other sections of the community could do likewise. There is some flexibility within the Inland Revenue arrangement at the moment, and I do not intend to weary the House by going into detail. I suggest, however, that when we fix our own salaries and our own pensions we are under a special obligation to ensure that we do not act in a way that appears unfair to others.
In my view, the Bill perpetuates a bad precendent which was established in 1976. My fear is that it will become permanent. There is an arguable case for those who are retiring at the end of this Parliament and who otherwise would be trapped with a reduced pension indefinitely. I am all for making special arrangements


for them, but to go beyond that would be inequitable and difficult to defend to people outside.
I am sorry to strike a discordant note on this domestic occasion, but I believe that it would be wrong to let the Bill go by without expressing my misgivings on these two important points of principle.

11.35 p.m.

Mrs. Barbara Castle: Looking round the Chamber, I am struck by the fact that many hon. Members here have a direct or highly imminent interest in the provisions of the Bill. I include myself in that because I shall not run for Parliament again at the next General Election.
I believed that this was not a discussion about pay, but the arguments have seemed to widen beyond pensions to cover hon. Members' salaries and I could not help thinking how much better it would be if hon. Members had a trade union. It would then be clear that, just like anyone else, we were a sectional interest negotiating, quite legitimately, for proper remuneration.
I have always believed in an adequate remuneration for hon. Members. When I first became an hon. Member in 1945, the pay was derisory and it was argued that any increase in hon. Members' pay was unpopular in the constituencies. So it was, but I always said to my workers in Blackburn that if they wanted Members who were independent of outside interests and dedicated only to their constituents they would have to be paid a living wage.
However, I get a little worried about the coalition of self-interest that is growing up as we discuss how worthy we are of better treatment. How are we to get an adequate adjudicator in that situation? My right. hon. Friend the Member for Vauxhall (Mr. Strauss), a highly respected hon. Member who has done a marvellous job in pensions, put forward an astonishing doctrine when he said that he hoped that there would be a total commitment by both sides of the House that the Boyle Report should be accepted uncritically—whatever it said about hon. Members' salaries—by the next Government.
That is an extremely dangerous doctrine because it seems to imply that there

should be an exemption of immunity for hon. Members from the political pressures of pay policy that any Government must and will accept. I remember other highly deserving professions—it may surprise hon. Members if I quote the example of consultants in the NHS—who had their Review Body's findings decimated by considerations of pay policy with the introduction of a ceiling and a cut-off point. They had to accept it in the national interest—and quite right too.
I accept the integrity of the hon. Member for Somerset, North (Mr. Dean) in pension matters. I know his interest and dedication in these matters. I must tell the hon. Gentleman that I find no difficulty in accepting that pensions should be based on notional incomes. I believe I am right in recollecting that that happened to the consultants and others who suffered from interference with Review Body findings in the interests of pay policy. We are not the only ones to have found ourselves in that position. I find no difficulty in accepting that our pensions should be based on a notional income if it means that we have been refused our full arbitration award by a Review Body in the interests of the national pay policy.
I was a member of the Government who decided that there should be a cutoff point at £8,500. I supported it. The cut-off point operated against many professionals who had Review Body findings in their interests. I thought that it was right to accept that cut-off, and I did so in the interests of Members and Ministers. Britain was right up against it in 1975. By heavens, we would never have turned back the tide of inflation if some of us had not given a lead and accepted the denial of our salary awards.

Mr. English: All Labour Members agreed with and approved of the cut-off point of £8,500. However, we did not understand why the Cabinet of the day, before it introduced the present pay policy, said that we should not get the £8,000 that was recommended by the Commission, to which it was committed.

Mrs. Castle: These are inevitably and perfectly legitimately all matters of self-interest. We have to give some sort of national leadership. That is part of the price of being in politics. Despite an arbitration award on behalf of Cabinet Ministers, I was in favour of a cut in Ministers' salaries.
It may be said that that interferes with the proper development of differentials and salary relationships. I repeat that I am not suggesting that we should endlessly accept an inferior status for Members' pay. I am anxious to liberate Members from dependence on outside private income and interests. That is important. However, we have been through exceptional years in our national history. It was totally right that we should have given such leadership. Members have suffered. I am sorry, but it was inevitable that we should. I do not worry if there happens to have been created a slight anomaly whereby our pensions are related to notional pay.
The amendment of the hon. Member for Somerset, North remains contradictory when it states on the one hand that we should not have pension privileges that are not applicable to others universally but on the other hand asks for exceptional treatment for widows and the pensions of Members before the statutory scheme was introduced in 1964.
These are immensely complex matters. There will always be anomalies. One can only try to stick to broad guiding principles. I accept that it is imperative that we do not vote ourselves privileges that are denied to others. All that we have voted ourselves so far is the privilege of accepting reductions in our arbitration awards, which is an excellent example. I do not make any apologies for it.
I wish to raise a question of principle and one in which I cannot be said to have a direct interest. That is because if it arose within my family I should be dead. I refer to the widower's pension. This was touched on briefly by the right hon. Member for Cambridgeshire (Mr. Pym). My ears pricked up when he started, but what a throwaway line that was. It was almost an exit line over his shoulder. I believe that it should be built up as one of the major issues of principle before us. I maintain that it is intolerable that this House, which for some years has been busy equalising the rights of men and women, should in the Bill endorse, reinforce and perpetuate a gross injustice against one deserving section of our society—the widowers.
After all, we are discussing a superannuation scheme in which women Members have always had the same rights and

obligations as men. I have been a Member of this House now for 33 years. During that period I have always earned exactly the same salary as male Members of Parliament. If anybody had tried to pay me 75 per cent. of the male rate, I would have chained myself to the railings outside in protest, just as certain eminent ladies did a considerable number of years ago—an event that we shall be celebrating in the near future. I have always worked, I was going to say exactly the same hours as male Members, but, if we were to take a tally, if we were to clock in and clock out, I think that it would be found that women Members of Parliament pro rata had always worked longer hours than the men [Hon. Members: "No"]—because they are cursed with the obstacle of over-conscientiousness. Certainly our stamina is greater than that of the men and we are less flaked out at 6 o'clock in the morning after an all-night sitting.
It is indisputable that we have paid the same contributions as our male colleagues under every pension scheme which has been brought before the House. If the Bill goes through, the contributions of women Members will rise to 6 per cent., just the same as the men's.
Under the present scheme, the widow of a male Member gets half of what would have been his entitlement. Under the Bill, that will be supplemented by a short-term scheme which will help still further the widows of Members.
I ask the House to consider what a number of us probably never have considered—namely, what does our pension scheme do for the widower? If he is to get any of his wife's pension entitlement—this is becoming a slightly pressing matter in my own case—he must, according to Section 14(1) of the Parliamentary and other Pensions Act 1972,
at the time of her death
—it may not be later; it must be at the very moment of her death—be
incapable by reason of age or bodily or mental infirmity of earning his own living and was wholly or mainly dependent on her".
That is happening at the time when, under the pension scheme that I introduced into the House as Secretary of State for Social Services and which became operative in April this year, we have abolished for women the archaic and demeaning concept of dependency. Under


that new pension scheme the married woman's option is phased out. Women at work must contribute over a phasing-in period at the same rate as men and will receive the same pension as men in the same earnings range.
Yet for the husbands of women Members of this House we continue to perpetuate the demeaning concept of dependency. Really, this is to stand sex equality on its head. It is also to violate the contributory principle. That is why I bring this to the attention of the hon. Member for Somerset, North, who, I know, is involved in certain private pension schemes. All the best occupational pension schemes are getting rid of that attitude. Private schemes are increasingly incorporating pensions for widowers on exactly the same basis as for widows. The only logical application of sex equality, to which the House has been committed in Bill after Bill in the last few years, is to introduce not a widow's benefit but a survivor's benefit on equal terms regardless of sex. Why do we not do it? The logic of it is unanswerable. We have all paid for it.
There is a built-in discrimination which is actuarially unjustifiable. I shall explain why we do not do it. It is not because it would cost a lot of money. I asked my right hon. Friend the Lord President what would be the cost to our contributory pension scheme of giving widowers of Members pensions on the same basis as those we give to widows of Members. I asked what increase would have to be made in Members' contributions to meet the cost. The reply, given by my right hon. Friend the Minister of State, was:
Since the Parliamentary Contribution Pensions Scheme has relatively few lady Members, no significant additional cost would arise if benefits were to be available equally to widows and widowers. Such a change would, however, set a precedent for comparable public service pension schemes where the cost would be very substantial."—[Official Report, 19th June 1978; Vol. 952, c. 331.]
That is a marvellous new version of the servant girl's justification for her illegitimate child. The trouble is that it would be a very big one.
It was this creation of precedent that led the Treasury to forbid me as Secretary of State for Social Services to include a survivor's benefit when I was drawing up

the new State pension scheme which became operative in April. However, we made some progress in that scheme. At least, we did not drag in the discredited concept of dependency.
On the contrary, the White Paper on the better pensions scheme provided for equality of treatment for the widower where both he and his wife had retired. In that situation the widower's pension could be augmented by his wife's earnings. That may not be a complete introduction of the principle of equality, but it is a great deal better than the squalid criterion that the widower must be incapable, physically and mentally, of providing for himself.
In strict logic, therefore, in this year when we are celebrating the introduction of universal suffrage as the first step to equality, this Government, who have done so much to extend the concept of equality, should be bringing forward new changes to our pension scheme which would give the surviving husbands of Members of Parliament half the wife's pension entitlement, just as the surviving wives get half that of the male Members. Not all Members' wives are dependent on their husbands by any means.
I wonder what the House would say if at the Committee stage of the Bill I were to move an amendment to put before the word "widows" everywhere that it appears, not only in the Bill but in the Parliamentary and other Pensions Act 1972, "dependent and incapable of self-support". What if that were a criterion for a widow's pension? Everyone in the House would be horrified.
We cannot, of course, get too out of line with the provision for the generality of the citizens, but I believe that we can adopt the same principles as our State pension scheme. Therefore, I give warning to my right hon. Friend that when the Committee stage is reached I shall be moving very reasonable and very moderate amendments to start getting a realistic concept of sex equality by adjustments in the widower's pension scheme and a removal of the grotesque criterion for qualification that exists at present.
I hope that my right hon. Friend will consider my reasonable proposals very seriously and very sympathetically.

11.56 p.m.

Mr. Kenneth Baker: My interest in the Bill is not quite as imminent as the interest of the right hon. Member for Blackburn (Mrs. Castle). I hope not to benefit from its provisions for at least 22 years. I must remember to remind my electors of that hope and intention at an early opportunity.
Like many hon. Members who have spoken in the debate, I also welcome the Bill. I hope, however, that commentators outside the House will not believe that we are trying to create through the Bill a life of feather-bedded luxury for ourselves when we retire, because I believe that our pension fund is a very modest fund. I do not believe that if one were establishing a fund in the private sector one would immediately look at and consider the House of Commons Members' Pension Fund as an ideal fund and would base one's fund upon it. Indeed, our fund, as my hon. Friend the Member for Somerset, North (Mr. Dean) has said—he is a great expert in these matters—is falling behind many funds in the private sector, both in its provision and in the amount that we contribute to it.
Therefore, I very much hope that the impression does not get around that this is a lavish scheme and that we are doing rather well for ourselves. That is not so at all.
On a point of acrimony, perhaps, I must may that I very much regret that the Government did not bring in the Bill earlier, because there is considerable doubt whether it should not have been brought in in 1976. It is a matter of opinion whether it offended against stage 1 of the Government's incomes policy, because there was no statutory backing for that policy, so it can be only a matter of opinion, therefore, that the proposals in the Bill now before us offended against that policy.
That is a matter for debate. What is not a matter for debate is that the Bill should be made retrospective to August last year. I ask the Government to look carefully, before the Committee stage next week, at whether some changes can be made, because by not bringing in the Bill by August of last year all the dependants of our colleagues who have died since that time have suffered a permanent loss in benefit which cannot be made up. They

have suffered that loss as a result of the dilatory behaviour of the Government.
Therefore, I believe that it is incumbent upon the Government to see, before the Committee stage, whether some amendments or provisions can be made to allow those dependants of Members who have died since August of last year to benefit—of course, it is the dependants particularly who will benefit from the Bill—and to receive what I think is their right. If the Government had acted promptly, it would certainly have been their right.
The House is always in an awkward situation when it is debating its own pay and pensions. We are the only group in society that can determine absolutely what we pay ourselves and what levels of pension we set.

Mr. Joseph Harper (Comptroller of Her Majesty's Household): We have made a very bad job of it.

Mr. Baker: That puts us in a very bad position, and, as the Government Whip has just said, we have made a very bad job of it. I am glad to get that support from the Treasury Bench. We have, indeed, over the years made a very bad job of it. That is one reason why we have said that we should ask an independent body headed by Lord Boyle, as it were to do this rather unpleasant task for us.
The whole concept behind asking Boyle to report is that Boyle should be accepted, because if he is not to be accepted we might just as well do the job ourselves, imperfectly as we can. The danger of asking Boyle to report and not accepting Boyle is that we are looking on Boyle as a sort of current bun from which one picks out the currants that one wants. As a result, all our pay and pension debates become a sort of catch-as-catch-can.
I argued from the Government Dispatch Box when introducing the Bill in 1972 just what the Minister argued, which is that we must stick to the principle of accepting the proposals in full. I accept that principle, but the Government have departed from it. I do not know why the Government have departed from that principle, but they have done so because they have not accepted the proposals of Boyle in full. They have accepted some of Boyle's proposals, and that puts the


House in an exceptionally difficult position.
I echo what the Chairman of the 1922 Committee said, what the Father of the House said and, indeed, what the Chairman of the Parliamentary Labour Party said, which is that we must move to a better way than we have at present of determining our own pay, allowances and pensions. I believe that the answer lies in having a reconstituted Boyle Committee after the election and for it to report to the House and for the House to decide upon those findings.
If the Government of the day, for various national income considerations, wish to phase or stage those recommendations, that is for the Government of the day to try to persuade the House to do, but this is basically a House of Commons matter and we as responsible Members of the House of Commons should surely be allowed to decide whether we favour or disagree with the findings of Boyle.
I support that, because if we move away from the principle of accepting Boyle in full we move immediately into the area of saying that there is a good case for pre-1964 Members. I think that there is, as my hon. Friend the Member for Somerset, North has argued tonight. I think that there is a very good case for what has been called the Lomas amendment, but we get into the area of picking and choosing once we abandon the principle of accepting the report in its totality.
We have debated these matters several times since I have been a Member. I hope very much that we shall move to a better system. As the Government Whip said, we have done very badly for ourselves. The only Assembly that pays its Members less than we do is the Assembly of Luxembourg. I do not know where Luxembourg stands in the pecking order—perhaps the great aunt three times removed—but it pays its Members less than we do. The Irish Parliament pays its Members rather more than we do. It is one of the ironies of the last 100 years of our history that the Assembly that meets in Eire pays its Members more than we do. I think that they were rather lucky to get away with that.
I believe that the House should take a much stronger stand as a House. We as Members of Parliament should take a

much stronger stand. I believe that we should be quite robust in rebutting the accusations which are made that we are trying to make a very cosy position for ourselves in our pay, allowances and pensions. That is not the case. It is evidently not the case. This is a slight improvement along the road. I hope that the Bill will go through basically as it is, but I believe that what should come out of it is a very much better system of making these arrangements on a permanent basis.

12.5 a.m.

Mr. Robert Mellish: I have been very impressed with most of the speeches that I have heard from both sides of the House, because I have listened to almost every debate on the salaries and conditions of Members of Parliament in the last 32 years. I always found it all very interesting to listen to and all very personal.
Looking back over the years, I remember that it was I who initiated a motion demanding an increase of pay for Members of Parliament. I remember Lord Shawcross, a gallant Socialist, walking into the Chamber in his dinner jacket at the tail end of the debate and supporting the motion warmly, which almost ruined our case. I remember the late Sir Winston Churchill, when he was Prime Minister. He had a lot of sympathy for Members of Parliament, but he really was not too enthusiastic. He brought in a system giving us an additional allowance per day, but only from Monday to Thursday. I remember saying to him—I suppose that I was as crude then as I am now—"I don't understand this. I eat on Fridays, and I come here on Fridays. Why can't I get paid on Fridays?" He looked at me as though to say "I've never heard of you before". Anyway, he was not much interested. But we have had all sorts of systems.
My right hon. Friend the Member for Blackburn (Mrs. Castle) quickly and conveniently forgets history when she wants to. She had better be reminded of it. I have taken an interest in Members' salaries by making speeches on the subject and getting some of the venom, too. Much of it came on television. Certain of my hon. Friends appeared on television with me on one occasion following an argument that Members should


get more money, and they said "not until the old-age pensioners get more". That was the great theme. I remember getting hundreds of abusive letters. I remember, too, that one hon. Member—I had better not name him, because he is still a Member—got hundreds of letters of praise. But I am that sort of person. I thought it was right to get up and say that an MP's salary then, as now, was lousy, rotten and, for the job that he did, an absolute disgrace.
The history, which my right hon. Friend the Member for Blackburn has conveniently forgotten, was that Boyle came in because for years and years we had tried to solve this problem by this type of debate, when we tried to resolve it ourselves with silly motions put down by various individuals of all different factions, and then rather shamefacedly going through the Lobbies and voting.
My right hon. Friend says glibly that we ought to have a trade union. Of course, that is silly too. It is silly in the context of the trade union movement, and I know as much about the trade union movement as does my right hon. Friend, because I was actually born in it. So that is out, too.
What we did was that Lord Houghton, as he now is—then the right hon. Member for Sowerby—as the key man, brought forward the motion that took this matter right outside the orbit of this House and gave it to an independent committee which was to be set up. We did not know then that Lord Boyle was to be the chairman. I remember that the right hon. Member for Penrith and The Border (Mr. White-law) took a prominent part, and I remember that he was extremely co-operative and sensible and picked up this idea at once.
The result was that we made history by, for the first time, putting the matter to an outside body. But who were these people? Let us get that on record. First of all, of course, there was Lord Boyle. There was a trade unionist on the Committee, one of the most eminent of all. There were tycoons from private industry. They were representative of the whole range of our society. When they spoke, this was not some trade union cabal saying what we should get.

Mrs. Castle: Will my right hon. Friend give way?

Mr. Mellish: With respect, my right hon. Friend did not give way to other hon. Members. I am not sure that I ought to give way to her.

Mr. English: She gave way to me.

Mr. Mellish: In that case I will give way to her. Anyone who gives way to my hon. Friend the Member for Nottingham, West (Mr. English) must be in trouble.

Mrs. Castle: Does not my right hon. Friend agree that, instead of having an ad hoc body appointed by the Government to adjudicate upon us or anyone else, it would be better to have our salaries linked to those of some group of people whose wages and conditions had to be negotiated by a trade union?

Mr. Mellish: Now my right hon. Friend has moved into another area. That is not what she said earlier. However, I want to keep to my theme.
The Boyle Committee was established, and none of us knew who would be on it. But, when its membership was announced, even the national newspapers, which have never been our friends, admitted that it was indeed a body absolutely above suspicion in that it represented all strata of society. However, the irony is that, although the Boyle Committee has, over a number of years, said things about this House and its membership which are to the credit of the House and its membership, they have not been accepted.
One of the suggestions which have already' been argued and debated is that we should link an MP's salary with, for example, the assistant secretary rank. But we know who the biggest opponent of that is, and I will remind my right hon. Friend the Member for Blackburn—the trade union movement. Of course it is, because if we linked an MP's salary to the rank of assistant secretary, whose salary today would be about £11,000, when the unions went to negotiate for the assistant secretary they would be told "Watch it, brother. You give it to that lot, and you have to give it to that other lot in the House of Commons". It was the trade union movement itself that did not like the idea and did not want it.
I was thinking of mentioning the newspapers again, but I had better not because there are some which are not very friendly


disposed towards this House which spend all their time attacking us, and it really is quite a scandal. But, in fact, it is now conceded that the Boyle Committee was the ideal body to do the job.
I defend why the Government did not implement the last recommendations of the Boyle Committee. I was here when it all took place, when this £6,000 and £8,000 malarkey came into being. The truth is—we were all here at the time and we knew the atmosphere—that we could not have introduced what Boyle recommended, the £8,000 a year. If we had, the percentage increase for MPs would have been way over anything and everything that we were asking others to accept. I have always understood and been considerate about that.
But I say this to my right hon. Friends. There comes a time when the House really has to have the guts to say "This is a report made by men and women of calibre and, therefore, this is what should be done". I cannot treat with scorn, as my right hon. Friend the Member for Blackburn did, the idea that there should be a concordat between the two major parties that whatever the Boyle Committee recommends will be implemented by the next Government.
Like other Members, I am on my way out now; it does not matter so much for me. But it certainly matters for those who are yet to come, and the time is coming when we have to say to the Press and the public "This House is something that we are proud to be Members of, and if you are doing a job of which you are proud you must make it incorruptible".
We are not asking for great salaries. We only want to make sure that the men and women who come here to serve their nation will be paid properly in a way recommended by a Committee whose objectivity is unquestioned. Whatever the Boyle Committee recommends, let it be implemented. Let us not go on with this appalling anomaly of getting a salary on the one hand and a pension much higher on the other.
I say this to my right hon. Friend the Leader of the House. I hope that he will be Leader of the House for many years to come, but I must tell him that the present situation cannot go on. We must change it. The right hon. Member

for Cambridgeshire (Mr. Pym) made an excellent speech, and I agree with him that the time is well overdue to take this matter out of the ordinary orbit of the House and for us to have the courage to tell the truth to our people and trust them.
I represent a constituency where the wages are not very high. I remember an incident with regard to the salaries of Members. At the time when we were getting £1,500 a year, a character in my constituency came up to me and asked "Do I understand that you MPs are getting only £1,500 a year?" I replied "Yes, that is right." He asked "Is it a fact that you are able to decide the salaries for yourselves?" I replied "Yes, that is right." He replied "Serves you bloody right." That just about puts it in a nutshell.

12.15 a.m.

Sir Nigel Fisher: I agree entirely with all that the right hon. Member for Bermondsey (Mr. Mellish) has said about pay. Of course, it was absolutely right to set up the Boyle Committee and absolutely wrong then totally to disregard what that Committee recommended. However, I shall not follow the right hon. Gentleman in any detail, because I want to be very brief indeed at this late hour, especially when many of my hon. Friends still want to take part in the debate.
As one of the Managing Trustees of the Parliamentary Pensions Fund from the Conservative side of the House, I want to support our Chairman, the right hon. Member for Vauxhall (Mr. Strauss). I also want to thank the Minister for introducing the Bill and the Lord President for having brought it forward, not before time and not without some pressure from the Trustees, from my right hon. Friend the Member for Taunton (Mr. du Cann), the Chairman of the 1922 Committee, and from the right hon. Member for Anglesey (Mr. Hughes), the Chairman of the Parliamentary Labour Party. On this occasion—I thought absolutely rightly, because it is a House of Commons matter—they made joint representations to the Leader of the House.
The proposals before us tonight give effect to the recommendations of the Boyle Committee, to which I should also like to pay tribute, because Lord Boyle and the members of his Review Body gave very sympathetic consideration to


the suggestions which the Trustees of the Pensions Fund submitted to them.
There was only the one omission to which the right hon. Member for Vauxhall referred which disappointed us. That was with regard to the small improvement in children's pensions which the Trustees had recommended. We merely wanted a rise in the rate of those pensions from one-eighth of the former Member's entitlement to one-quarter, subject to a maximum of two children eligible at any one time, and we hoped that children's pensions could be continued up to the age of 17—at present it is 16—without the child necessarily continuing in full-time education. The cost of doing so would have been absolutely negligible, because only 12 children's pensions are being paid at present. It would have had the effect of putting the children of hon. Members on the same footing as those of civil servants, teachers, National Health Service employees and all other public sector workers.
I do not understand why Members' dependants should be treated less favourably than those in other branches of the public service. I believe that the right hon. Member for Vauxhall wrote to the Lord President on this point, but the Government did not feel able to go beyond the recommendations contained in the Boyle Report. If I may say so, the Government are somewhat selective in their treatment of Lord Boyle's reports. When it suits them, they stick rigidly to Boyle, but when it does not—as in the case of Members' pay—they ignore Boyle altogether. I hope that the Lord President will be prepared to reconsider the position of children during the Committee stage of the Bill.
In other respects the Bill seems to me comprehensive and fair. Indeed, at my age of, alas, 64, and after more than 28 years' service in this House, I really feel that I should almost declare an interest when I support the Bill because when I look particularly at Clauses 1 and 10 I see that they are virtually tailor-made to suit my particular circumstances!
I am glad that the Minister referred in passing to one point—not precisely a pensions point—which arises out of Early-day Motion No. 252. It seems wrong that a Member elected in February 1974 and defeated in October 1974 could

have received severance pay of three months salary after serving for only a few months, whereas a Member who has served for 20 years or more and who retires through ill health can receive nothing more than his pension—although if he had been defeated in that election he, too, would have received three months' salary.
Hon. Members who have to retire through ill health in, say, their fifties would find it hard to obtain alternative employment quickly and three months' pay would be a great help at a difficult time. To give it to them would be a humane gesture—important to a few individuals, and at very little cost to the State.
I was informed by the Table Office that I should be out of order in referring in this debate to Members' pay, so I threw away some carefully prepared notes. However, a great deal of latitude has in fact been allowed to hon. Members on both sides. I am very glad that it has. I totally agreed with everything said by my right hon. Friend the Member for Taunton. However, there will no doubt be another opportunity soon to refer to this matter in more detail, so I shall say no more on that tonight.
I would only underline the point made by my right hon. Friend the Member for Cambridgeshire (Mr. Pym) that it is complete nonsense to base pensions on a notional figure, as the Government have had to do because our pay is so derisory compared with that in any other comparable legislature in the world. Pensions should obviously be based on pay, which should be far higher than it is today.

12.22 a.m.

Mr. Michael English: I should like to ask one relevant question. Will the Government permit amendments to the Bill on the lines suggested tonight? To take a simple example, the possibility of pensions to 12 children is clearly something about which an amendment should be possible. But it is not, because the Bill has a very restricted Title and there is a Money Resolution and a Ways and Means Resolution. Therefore, I hope that whoever replies for the Government will do as was done in the case of the Speaker's pension Bill—not the present Speaker but a previous one—and say that if the House desires such


amendments, technicalities will be overcome and an appropriate Money Resolution will be put down by the Government so that there will be no question of 12 children losing the possibility of a pension merely because of the technicality that no one but a Minister can move that they should have it. I see the Minister nodding and I am grateful to him. It would be inappropriate if that happened merely because of a procedural technicality of the way in which we deal with money in the House.
My right hon. Friend the Member for Blackburn (Mrs. Castle) said that we have a terrible problem in these matters because we may create precedents. The Expenditure Committee, in its report on the Civil Service, touched on pensions, a matter of some interest because many Civil Service pensions are inflation-proofed. In times of high inflation, they are a matter of some concern to the public because no private firm can afford to keep up with such inflation proofing. I do not think that the right hon. Lady need worry about the precedent we might create in improving Members' pensions.
There are 7,090,000 people who are affected by public sector pensions. Of those, 3,900,000 are in schemes to which they contribute and for which there are actual pension funds. These include people in local government, public corporations and so on. Then there are 1,950,000 who actually contribute but have no actual pension fund, only a notional one. These include every teacher in the land and the 1,125,000 in the National Health Service, as well as odds and ends like the United Kingdom Atomic Energy Authority.
Then there are 1,085,000 who pay no contributions whatever, and receive pensions from no fund whatever. These are 750,000 in the Civil Service, and 335,000 in the Armed Forces. There is no precedent that will be created by dealing with Members of Parliament, except for one very small and interesting group of people. There are only 155,000 people out of over 7 million who are in the same situation. They are the only ones, apart from us, who pay contributions but receive their pensions from a totally unfunded pension scheme. They are the police and the firemen.
It might be of some interest to my right hon. Friend the Member for Blackburn that whatever precedent we create for ourselves might form a precedent for the police and firemen but for no one else in the land. I do not mind creating a precedent for the police and for firemen. I think that they well deserve it. Conservative Members may wish to consider that when they are advocating an appropriate pension for Members of Parliament they are also advocating them for the police and firemen. This is a matter of some importance. We have discussed the question of pay policy for Members, but I do not think that I should mention the possibility of creating a precedent for the police and firemen in the context of pay policy.
No Government have ever decided whether they regard Members of this House as self-employed—635 small businesses—or as employees. We are treated far worse than employees. Outside the House we would be appalled if someone produced an arbitration award and it was turned down promptly—not on the principle that it did not conform with a pay policy, but on the principle that it did not conform with a pay policy that might be introduced a few weeks or months later. The Leader of the House is shaking his head. I have been discussing this issue with someone with whom he too has discussed it—the retiring general secretary of the Transport and General Workers' Union. The reason we did not obtain our award was nothing to do with pay policy, but was in order to persuade Mr. Jack Jones and others that there should be a pay policy. In order to persuade members of the general council of that fact, we had to forgo what we were entitled to before any incomes policy was produced.
Of course, we should conform to any incomes policy that is applied to the rest of the community. In other words, we should have had £8,000, plus £6, plus son of £6, plus 10 per cent. But in order to have a pay policy, some of the sacrificial lambs comprised Members of this House, who, by the standards of other people, are underpaid.
There is an obvious and simple principle by which Members of Parliament should be paid. No civil servant has the power, which a majority of Members of this House possess, to pass almost any


piece of legislation. We are restricted in passing legislation in only one respect. We may not pass a law to extend the term of this House without an election and without the consent of the House of Lords. Perhaps we may have to pass some other things in two Sessions, but anything else we may do. We may even pass a law, as has been done by this House in the past, to have somebody executed. We may do anything we wish.
In the United States Congress, which has less power because it is restricted by a federal constitution, there is a simple belief that no civil servant should be paid more than a member of Congress because in the United States civil servants have less power. A civil servant is a member of the Executive and a member of the Executive in the United States has to obey the law, and the law is changed and determined by the two Houses of Congress there. There are people equivalent to our Ministers who are paid more than are members of Congress, but civil servants are not.
The clear principle which should be appropriate to Members of this House is that they should be paid more than their subordinates, the civil servants in the United Kingdom. Merely to state that principle, which has never been slated in this debate, shows how far behind we have fallen in this country. We genuinely believe as a House of Commons that our subordinates should be paid more than we are paid. We carry such actions into effect, and I wonder whether possibly the way in which we govern the remuneration of those who are concerned in Government in this country has something to do with the way in which government in this country is not as effective as perhaps it once was in the nineteenth century. But we are, strictly speaking, talking not of pay but of pensions.
My right hon. Friend the Member for Bermondsey (Mr. Mellish) said that he thought Lord Boyle's Committee represented every stratum of society. I gave evidence to that Committee, and I think that Lord Boyle, Lord Plowden, Lady Seear, and the worthy gentleman who was once permanent secretary to the Lord Chanceller are eminent, capable and competent people, but I do not think they represent every stratum of society. Indeed, three-quarters of them are in another place, and that I have never

regarded as representing every stratum of society, even though a small proportion are life peers put there by my right hon. Friend the Prime Minister or one of his predecessors. Up to now, many things have been done for us, or even against us, which we have had no opportunity to talk about. For example, only recently the trustees of the Members' pension fund decided to opt us out of the State pension scheme. I hope that in Committee we shall have an opportunity to rectify that.
In the Bill that applies to most members of the community, anyone who wanted to do that was supposed to consult the trade unions representing the employees and tell the Occupational Pensions Board that this had been done. We have no trade union. There is doubt about whether we are employees or self-employed, so the Trustees, acting entirely within their legal jurisdiction, decided, first, that they would act as employers and advise Mr. Speaker, as our nominal employer, that he should opt us out of the State scheme and, secondly, that they would act as employees, consult themselves and advise themselves to opt us out of the State scheme.
If they had opted us in, we would have been forced to pay an extra £5 a week in contributions. It may be that, as the Trustees and their advisers suggested, hon. Members would not have wished to do that, but we were never asked. There was no debate in the Chamber or in a Committee room upstairs. Hon. Members could have been asked to go to one of the Committee rooms where it could have been put to them "If you wish to opt in to the State pension scheme, you will have to pay an extra fiver a week. If you do not, you will not have to pay that extra contribution, but, of course, you will not get the extra corresponding benefits. Which would you prefer? Hon. Members were never asked. They were treated in a more authoritarian way than any employer in the land would dare to treat his employees. I am glad that the average employer can no longer treat his employees in the way in which hon. Members are treated.
I was impressed by the speech of the hon. Member for Somerset, North (Mr. Dean). I can say with a clear conscience that I have no personal interest in the treatment of hon. Members who retired


before I was elected in 1964. I agree with the hon. Member for Somerset, North that it is a total disgrace that they should not be treated adequately. Some hon. Members have said that those people did not contribute. Not one of our 750,000 civil servants contributes a single penny, or ever has, towards his pension. No hon. Member before 1964 contributed a single penny towards his pension, but I do not see why he should not get one, in the same way that all the civil servants, members of the Armed Forces and others who do not contribute get their pensions.
I hope that the principle of the hon. Member for Somerset, North will prevail and that Ministers and those on the Opposition Front Bench will realise that some justice should be done to hon. Members who retired before 1964 and will not allow technicalities to stand in their way, but will ensure that justice is done.

12.40 a.m.

Mr. David Walder: I shall comment briefly on the question of comparability, which has run through the debate as a sort of theme. It applies equally to pensions as to pay. Pay is founded on the initial absurdity that it is referred to the Review Body on Top Salaries. Top salary it certainly is not.
There is the myth that somewhere in the public service, or in various selected sections of the public service, it is possible to find an exact parallel to other positions, other duties and other tasks, and that at the end of it we shall find some magical sum that will be the right and proper one to to pay to a Member of Parliament. The whole concept is a complete myth.
We have heard in the past that we have the parallel with the under-secretary. We all know that Members of Parliament may carry out other occupations while an under-secretary may carry out only one occupation. I carry out one other occupation and no other, namely, writing books. However, the under-secretary cannot moonlight. He is not a true comparison.
When dealing with the pension scheme I find that we are striving in Clause 1 to get near to the mythical public servant with which we compare ourselves. However, we find ourselves in a curious situation. It seems that at 62 years we

can retire advantageously. I believe that for the civil servant the equivalent age is 60 years. He receives certain benefits attributable to his years of service and we do not.

Mr. English: And he does not contribute.

Mr. Walder: Precisely. The curiosity of our position is that we may start our service in this place at 62 years. It is possible to be elected to the House for the first time at that age. It might be thought that these are Committee matters, but they are points of detail that lead me to my main argument that search as we may we shall not find true comparability.
Our pension scheme over the years has been an uneasy system. It has been rather like a house decorator with layers and layers of unmatching wallaper pasted one over the other but unfortunately the previous layer shines through.
I give a little support to the hon. Member for Nottingham, West (Mr. English), who gave me some. I hope that it is not out of order to report, without identifying, a conversation that I had with one of the class of community with which the hon. Gentleman compared Members. One of the police officers in the House passed the cryptic remark to me not so long ago "You made a right mess of your pension fund, and so have we of ours". To that extent, I think that the hon. Gentleman and I agree.
I do not think that we shall find some magic formula. I do not think that we shall find that by trade union representation, as suggested by the right hon. Member for Blackburn (Mrs. Castle), who, with her customary courtesy, has now departed the House. It was my last opportunity to interrupt her. I do not think that we shall agree about trade union representation. Therefore, I am driven inevitably towards something like the Boyle Committee, something that we can see as reasonably impartial. It does not have to involve every stratum of society, but let it be something that is able to take into account our position in this place and to judge our special conditions. The Boyle Committee was the first body to be set up that considered our peculiar working conditions, and considered them properly.
For my final point I turn to the Minister who introduced the Bill, which I welcome in a limited way because it is, after all, a limited Bill. The Bill goes along the road towards what my right hon. Friend the Member for Taunton (Mr. du Cann) suggested in his admirable speech. If we are to look for a body to examine our affairs, be they pensions or pay, it must be something like the Boyle Committee and have changes of membership.
Any system of comparability—and it would be artificial comparability—at which the House arrived would be regarded by various sections of the community as unfair. The nearest that we can get to fairness is to have our financial situation judged by a committee such as the Boyle Committee.

12.45 a.m.

Mr. John Stokes: I hope that the fact that we are discussing this important Bill after 10 o'clock—indeed, at quarter to one in the morning—with about 20 Members present does not mean that the Lord President, who has been here throughout the debate, but for the moment has left the Chamber, does not consider it as important as I believe it to be. I am sorry that he did not agree to my request during questions on business last Thursday to discuss our salaries at the same time as we discuss our pension arrangements, because pensions are based on salaries and the two subjects, as we have seen tonight, must be closely intertwined.
Pension matters are extremely complex. Therefore, I welcome the Minister's suggestion that in future our pension arrangements should be governed by rules rather than by a complicated series of Acts of Parliament.
Like my right hon. Friend the Member for Cambridgeshire (Mr. Pym), I deplore the delay in bringing forward the Bill. I hate to introduce a discordant note into what is a House of Commons, not a party, matter, but I suspect that the Lord President does not entirely have his heart in this matter.
As hon. Members know, I have spent the last 30 years or so since the war dealing with pensions and salaries. I found Parliament the most difficult and confusing, if I cannot say employer, perhaps I can say task master that I have ever come across.
I should like now to refer to what was said by my hon. Friend the Member for Clitheroe (Mr. Walder). I do not think that the House will ever quite make up its mind about the kind of people that we are. I can see a case for paying us no salary at all and, therefore, no pension. That situation persisted for the greater part of England's history and at a time when, on the whole, our affairs were much better regulated than they are now. But I do not believe that most people would think that today this Chamber should be filled entirely by extremely rich people. Therefore, the alternative must be to pay us a realistic salary. I do not say that we should be paid the rate for the job, because no two Members, let alone people outside, could possibly give an accurate job description.
However, I cannot for the life of me see a case for paying ourselves exceptionally low salaries. Exceptionally low salaries must lead to exceptionally low pensions. Perhaps the one good thing about the European Assembly, which I do not like, may be the influence that it must have on salary and pension rates here.
I think that our salaries and pensions should be related, at least to some extent, to those paid by the best employers in this country—say, companies such as ICI or Shell, if not quite up to the lush standards of the Civil Service whose members, as we know, do not contribute one penny towards their pensions. We all know, and I am surprised that it has not been mentioned tonight, of the cases of hon. Members who have stayed on when they wished to retire simply because they could not afford to do so. That seems to me quite scandalous and we have the remedy for it in our hands in this Bill.
Apart from the level of our salaries, the main weakness of the scheme must be the presumption of 40 years' service. There is confusion over the two "salaries" we receive. There is the actual salary that the public think we receive, and the other salary that some of us actually receive, which is lower because we disclaimed a rise some time ago. The notional salary for pension purposes of just over £8,000 should by now be £11,000 to take account of inflation since 1975. The level of salary is fundamental to the working of the pension scheme.
It is fair and reasonable to say that 40 years' service is what someone would expect in the private sector or in many other occupations. It is not fair here where the average length of service is only about 15 years. Therefore, to have a low level of salary and the 40-year term of service will lead to extremely depressed pensions. If we can attain a better salary level and a more realistic period of service—say, 30 years—that would go some way towards transforming our pension scheme.
I welcome all the recommendations. I particularly welcome Clause 9, which enables Members to purchase additional years of reckonable service. Perhaps the Lord President will confirm later that payments to this end will be free of income tax, which is an important factor in payments of this kind.
I have no objection to the increase in the Member's contribution from 5 to 6 per cent. if that will lead, as the presumption must be, to higher pensions.
I conclude by asking a number of questions. When will the wretched notional salary for pension purposes be brought to an end? This is a thoroughly unsatisfactory arrangement, as we have heard. Will the Government make an announcement on the subject before the next General Election? If we do not tackle it now it will continue as a festering problem.
On pensions, we have an overriding duty to our older Members. If we do not act with firmness and resolution now to put salaries and pensions on a proper basis, no one else will do it for us. When we debate the question of salaries, on which the pensions are based, which I hope we shall do very soon—I believe possibly next week—I hope that the House will insist on Boyle's £8,000 being put into effect forthwith. Further delay will only cause greater complications, and the nettle must be grasped now.
I support what my right hon. Friend the Member for Cambridge said in asking that the Review Body, which does a very good job, should be asked to sit again and recommend up-to-date salary levels for Members of Parliament. I hope that all hon. Members will try to persuade the Government to accept that. But let us remember that this is a House of

Commons matter and not just a Government matter.

12.54 a.m.

Mr. Michael Morris: I believe that I am the youngest Member to speak in the debate, and therefore, I hope, have the longest time to go before drawing my pension. I should like to pay a warm tribute to my right hon. Friend the Member for Taunton (Mr. du Cann) and the right hon. Member for Anglesey (Mr. Hughes) for the way in which they made their contributions tonight. They went beyond concentrating on the details of the Bill, and widened the scope of the debate. I hope that they have ensured that never again will this issue be brushed under the carpet.
My right hon. Friend the Member for Cambridgeshire (Mr. Pym) was right to say that there should be a commitment and an undertaking by both Front Benches, before going into a General Election, that the review that is carried out will he implemented in full, whatever it may be, when it is completed after an election.
I wish to comment on the point made by the right hon. Member for Blackburn (Mrs. Castle). I am married to a full-time practitioner in the National Health Service. I see no reason why I should be discriminated against if I were unfortunate enough to be a widower. But the right hon. Lady's point would have carried considerably more conviction if when she was Secretary of State for Social Services she had fought the case then. She did not do so. However, having said that, I support the case that she has made.
The point that I want to make, and the reason I have remained in the Chamber to make it, is that I think that it is incumbent on the Government and particularly the Boyle Committee to recognise that parliamentary service is not the same as service in the Civil Service or service in the private sector. The nearest comparison is with Her Majesty's judges. I think I am right in saying that their pension scheme is based on 15 years' service.
It seems to me that the Government and the Boyle Committee need to recognise that relatively few Members get to the House before the age of 40. We are nearly all just about 40 when we become


Members. At best, we are unlikely to do more than 25 or 26 years' continuous service, if we are lucky. That point needs to be taken on board by the people who review these pension arrangements. They need to recognise that we believe that it is tolerable that people should retire on two-thirds of salary. But none of us will serve for 40 years. Occasionally someone may be fortunate enough to serve for 40 years, but the vast majority will not serve for anywhere near that period. Frankly, they will not get a half of their salary as pension.
Therefore, I urge the Government, when they next reconstitute the Boyle Committee, to ask the Committee this question: is 40 years an appropriate length of time, or should not Members of Parliament be considered in a similar light to Her Majesty's judges and an assessment be made as to what should be an appropriate length of service for the basis of a pension?

12.58 a.m.

Mr. John Smith: The hon. Member for Northampton, South (Mr. Morris) said that he thought that he was the youngest person to contribute to the debate and was, therefore, very objective about it. I am afraid that I am the youngest person to contribute to the debate, and therefore I must be even more objective than his good self.
The main points that have been made in the debate are not surprising. They were obvious points that hon. Members who have thought about the pension scheme would be bound to make. We shall have a Committee stage, and I hope, therefore, that hon. Members will acquit me of discourtesy if I do not go into enormous detail on all the points made, because we shall have another opportunity, and perhaps a more suitable opportunity, to do that.
I thank the right hon. Member for Cambridgeshire (Mr. Pym) for his very kind personal remarks about myself. He surveyed the situation and complained that we were a little slow in bringing forward the Bill. None the less, he said that he was glad to see it. He raised some questions, without going into them in detail. No doubt he will return to them in Committee if he wishes to pursue them. However, he gave a general welcome to the Bill, as, indeed, did right hon. and

hon. Members in most parts of the House, with one solitary exception—the hon. Member for Somerset, North (Mr. Dean).
My right hon. Friend the Member for Anglesey (Mr. Hughes) and the right hon. Member for Taunton (Mr. du Cann) stressed that the Bill was really only a fair deal after some delay. I think that it is absolutely right to stress that we are not making any revolutionary proposals for the pension scheme. The proposals are very modest. All that they do is to bring up to date the Members' pension scheme in the light of improvements which have been made in other public service pension schemes. That is worth putting on record.
There have been references to Civil Service and judicial pension schemes. To be fair to the Civil Service, it must be remembered that, although contributions are not made, the fact is taken into account in the Pay Research Unit and in the method of establishing the salary. That fact, too, should be borne in mind.
The right hon. Member for Taunton asked me about the reference in Clause 16 to the pensions paid to the Speaker, the Prime Minister and the Lord Chancellor. He will be aware that in para. 102 of its report the Review Body on Top Salaries considered the pension arrangements. It considered that the arrangements would be satisfactory if the salary increases that had been recommended were implemented. Clause 16 deals with a small taxation point and tidies up an anomaly that results from the 1972 Act.
That underlines the point made by the right hon. Gentleman, that it is one thing to talk about a pension scheme and how it is organised, when perhaps the reality is its relationship to the salary and to the yardstick. To that extent, I think that right hon. and hon. Members were fully in order in referring to the salary levels, because there is not much point in talking about a pension scheme without a reference to the levels, and the levels in turn flow from the salary level that is determined.
My right hon. Friend the Member for Vauxhall (Mr. Strauss) referred to the submissions which the Trustees of the pension fund had made to the Review Body. I am glad that he did so, because the House is indebted to the initiative which the Trustees took in putting forward detailed recommendations and also


for the realistic and practical way in which they put them forward within the limits of political possibility. A great deal of what has emerged from the Review Body is the result of the initiative which the Trustees took in putting forward these recommendations.
My right hon. Friend raised a point about children's benefits. I hope that in Committee we shall be able to go into this in a little more detail than we have been able to do today, and I await the presentation of the argument on that occasion.
The hon. Member for Somerset, North has two grounds of objection to the Bill, although how far he will pursue his objection to it I am not yet clear. The first point that he raised was on the position of pre-1964 Members. I think that everyone has sympathy with Members who retired before we had a proper pension scheme and who may be in difficult circumstances, but I think that my right hon. Friend the Member for Vauxhall effectively answered the argument in his intervention during the hon. Gentleman's speech.
We have to take into account the fact that there were no contributions, however unfortunate that was, and that there is a serious difficulty of principle in catering for people before 1964. This is another matter to which we may return later, but the arguments were rehearsed in the Boyle Report, and there is serious difficulty for the Government in overturning the recommendations of the Boyle Report on that matter when it was thoroughly gone into by the Boyle Committee itself. The Committee felt unable to recommend that former Members with no service after the introduction of the parliamentary scheme should be entitled to a pension from the scheme. In rejecting the proposal that accommodation should be made for pre-1964 Members, Boyle took into account the fact that the Members fund does exist to help former Members in case of need, and I think my right hon. Friend the Member for Vauxhall said that effective assistance is given in circumstances of need. One would wish to cater for everybody, but there are serious problems of principle in catering for people before 1964.

Mr. Paul Dean: Will the Minister comment on the suggestion by the Boyle Committee that the House of Commons might like to consider doing something similar to the over-80s pensions? Will he at least put down a Government amendment so that we may discuss and vote on that suggestion?

Mr. Smith: I shall consider that suggestion, but it should be understood by the House that it is limited in scope. It applies only to the over-80s. I do not know the present age levels of people who were in Parliament and left before 1964, or in 1964. But it is limited to that extent.
There is another difficulty, though. There are other employees in the public sector and the private sector who retired before schemes were introduced and for whom no retrospective provision is likely to be made. I am informed that there may be hundreds of thousands of employees in the public sector and the private sector, and one genuine difficulty that we face is that if we are making provision for ourselves and for some of our colleagues who were in Parliament before any scheme was introduced, ought not there to be similar provision made for other people, especially people in public sector occupations, who were in a different position?
I cannot give any commitment that the Government will introduce such an amendment. They have considered this matter very carefully and come to a certain view about it. But certainly I will think again about what the hon. Member for Somerset, North said, although I hope that he will understand that I am not committing the Government to introducing any amendment.
My right hon. Friend the Member for Blackburn (Mrs. Castle) spoke eloquently and with force about sex equality in the pension scheme. I think in strict logic—she depended heavily on strict logic—there is very little that one can say against her argument on its merits. The difficulty again is the extension of the principle to other people in the public sector, and it might well involve a very large expenditure of public funds. I am told that if there were to be strict sex equality throughout the public sector pension schemes, putting widowers in the same position as widows,


it might involve expenditure of up to£20 million. Obviously this is a very serious matter. But it would be a little difficult to write amendments into the Bill to take account of such an important principle given the time scale that we want to achieve in passing the Bill. But no doubt the matter will be investigated more closely in Committee. The main difficulty that we see in it is the extension of the principle to other public sector schemes.

Mr. Michael Morris: Unless this House debates that issue, it will continue to be cast aside. No Department has been prepared to discuss it. I believe that it is the job of this House to discuss it.

Mr. Smith: I have no doubt that the House will discuss the issue in Committee, because my right hon. Friend the Member for Blackburn has indicated her intention to put down amendments. She is a lady of her word when it comes to that. So we shall be debating it in Committee. I thought that at present I should put the other side of the argument. We shall have to reach a conclusion in Committee. I am not making any objection to the principle of widowers being dealt with in the same way as widows, but there is always a difficulty in moving towards the establishment of such a principle and I am just expressing some caution about the difficulty in the way of doing so. It arises principally from the fact that there would be repercussions on other public sector pensions.
My hon. Friend the Member for Nottingham, West (Mr. English) asked about the attitude the Government would take towards amendments tabled in Committee. It is extremely difficult for me to say in advance whether amendments would be in order. It is not the intention of the Government to restrict hon. Members in proposing amendments simply on the ground that limited additional expenditure would be incurred. However, the Government would see more difficulty in accepting major increases in expenditure or increases which would invalidate the proposed contribution rate contained in the Bill. There is, of course, a correlation one with the other. I hope that my hon. Friend will accept that the Government will approach any amendments

with good intentions, in the light of what I have said.

Mr. English: I was thinking of the 12 children.

Mr. Smith: I do not think that there is anything further that I should go into in detail, bearing in mind that we shall be having a Committee stage. I hope that perhaps the hon. Member for Somerset, North will think again about his opposition to the Bill. I can understand the reasons why he objects to certain provisions, even though I do not agree with him. But to object to the Bill would be to stop from coming into effect much needed improvements in benefit to deserving individuals.

Question put and agreed to.

Bill accordingly read a Second time.

Bill committed to a Committee of the whole House.—[Mr. Coleman.]

Committee this day.

PARLIAMENTARY PENSIONS [MONEY]

Queen's Recommendation having been signified—

Resolved,
That, for the purposes of any Act of the present Session to make further provision with respect to the contributory pensions schemes for Members of the House of Commons and for the holders of certain Ministerial and other offices, it is expedient to authorise any increase attributable to that Act in the sums payable under the Parliamentary and other Pensions Act 1972 out of money provided by Parliament or out of or into the Consolidated Fund.—[Mr. Coleman.]

WAYS AND MEANS

PARLIAMENTARY PENSIONS

Resolved,
That any Act of the present Session to make further provision with respect to the contributory pensions schemes for Members of the House of Commons and for the holders of certain Ministerial and other offices may make provision for reducing the sum payable under subsection (3) of section 30 of the Parliamentary and other Pensions Act 1972 to or to the personal representatives of a former holder of an office mentioned in that subsection.—[Mr. Coleman.]

HUMBERSIDE (ROAD COMMUNICATIONS)

Motion made, and Question proposed, That this House do now adjourn.—[Mr. Coleman.]

1.10 a.m.

Mr. Michael Brotherton: I am grateful to have the opportunity to raise the subject of road communications on the south bank of the Humber. First, I would like the House to consider the geography of the Humber, north and south. There are two main ports on the Humber—Immingham, on the south bank, and Hull, on the north bank. Grimsby, a secondary port, is on the south bank. Grimsby and Immingham are, in fact, the same port: they are jointly called the port of Grimsby and Immingham by the British Transport Docks Board. On the south bank we have very poor road communications. Recently there has been completed the M62, which runs from Hull across the country to Liverpool. It runs the whole way across the nation. On the south bank, however, we have nothing like that.
We are building at the moment the Humber Bridge, which is to connect the two banks. There are those who say that the bridge is being built because there was a by-election in Hull in January 1966 and the right hon. Member for Blackburn (Mrs. Castle), then Minister of Transport, went to Hull and said that the Socialist Government would build a bridge across the Humber. That bridge is in the process of being constructed, and we all know now that, although it started at an estimated cost of £19 million, the cost will eventually end up at about £90 million. There is no way of preventing that bridge from being completed. It is a white elephant; it is unnecessary, and it goes from nowhere to nowhere. When it comes to the south bank of the Humber, there is no real road communication that is of any use at all.
Why do we need good roads on the south bank? The ports of Immingham and Grimsby together are the brightest jewel in the crown of the British Transport Docks Board. They make an enormous profit. Hull makes a loss while Grimsby and Immingham make a huge profit. At Immingham, which is in my constituency, we have ICI, Fisons and the

port, and millions of tons of goods go over the quay there every year. Immingham is the sixth largest port in the United Kingdom. Yet we have no roads. Grimsby is a great fishing port, but the Department of Transport has said recently that it is not to be regarded as a port at all.
The M180 is the road that is to go from the Humber Bridge across to Immingham and Grimsby. We are told that it will stop just short of Grimsby because Grimsby is no longer to be regarded as a major port. The road is to end at Pywipe. Pywipe is a field just outside Grimsby in my constituency. This dual carriageway is to end in a ploughed field, and we are told that this is because the Department of Transport no longer regards Grimsby as a major port.
It is not for me to make the case for Grimsby, because Grimsby is not in my constituency. Grimsby, however, is the major fishing port of the Humber. In Grimsby there are such factories as Findus, La Porte and Ross. There are other major food processors. Many of my constituents in Cleethorpes work in Grimsby. If one were to drive along the A18 on any night when the fishing vessels have come into Grimsby, one would know that many dozens of lorries go along that route. A tremendous traffic block is built up night after night because Grimsby, regardless of what the Ministry may say, is a port. Regardless of what the Ministry may say, Grimsby is a major fishing port which generates a tremendous amount of traffic.
My constituents in Cleethorpes, Humberston and the surrounding towns go to Grimsby to work or to fish. They may go to work in the factories that I have mentioned. As a result of all the jobs in which those people are engaged, traffic is generated and enormous numbers of lorries have to go along these roads. We are now told by the Ministry that nothing will be done: first, that nothing will be done until the 1980s and, secondly, that the road will stop at Pywipe.
Can the Minister really say that he regards Grimsby not to be a port? Can he really say that he does not regard the people in my constituency as working in a port? Can he really say that the traffic going from Grimsby towards the


Humber Bridge, or the traffic going towards the Al and Ml, is not important? Can he really say that he does not believe that this road is important?
I have said that we have the M62 on the north bank of the Humber. What is required on the south bank, as all those who work on the south bank know, is a decent east-west road communications system. The Humber Bridge is of little use to my constituents or to all those who work on the south bank. What is required is something which will tie in with the Al and MI north-south major trunk roads of the United Kingdom. We need roads which will tie in with the M62 so that we can get across the country to Liverpool.
At the moment, we have absolutely nothing at all. The M180 is being built and the Brigg bypass has been completed. Obviously, those who live in that area thank the Minister and the Department for what has been done, but the fact remains that the south bank is being betrayed in that we do not have a sufficient communications system which tics in with the north-south trunk routes of the nation. We are being totally ignored by the Department. We are being ignored to the extent that even the planning of the road will stop at Pywipe and will not even continue into Grimsby.
Those who live on the south bank of the Humber regard with great cynicism the granting of development area status to the south bank of the Humber just before the Grimsby by-election of about a year ago. Just over a year ago, the south bank of the Humber was given development area status, but since then nothing has been done to improve our communications or to give us a decent road system. Nothing has been done to help the people of Grimsby and Immingham to communicate with the rest of the country. People are in despair. What will the Minister do to help us?

1.20 a.m.

The Under-Secretary of State for Transport (Mr. John Horam): The hon. Member for Louth (Mr. Brotherton) has raised the subject of the road system on the south bank of the Humber and has made some fierce criticisms. He said that the south bank had a poor road system and that it was being betrayed. That is a travesty of the truth, as I am

sure, in calmer moments—perhaps at an earlier hour—he would recognise.
The road systems on the south bank are beginning to be very good indeed and we are making striking progress in improving them still further. At the end of the next two or three years they will be among the best in the country, considering the size of the area and the amount of traffic.
The hon. Gentleman said that the Government did not regard Grimsby as a port and he asked why a road ended in a field. In both cases he is absolutely wrong. Of course we regard Grimsby as a port. The Minister of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food is lighting to secure its interests as a port. Nor does the road end in a field. The Grimsby-West Marsh relief road is to be built by the Humberside County Council as a 1½ mile stretch of new road, to connect with the A18 trunk road termination in the Pywipe industrial estate—it is not a field—with the Grimsby town road network and the docks area, which is just the part of the port which should be connected with the road system.
The scheme will cost £4·25 million at today's prices and work is expected to start in time for its completion to be phased in with the opening of the new A18, which will connect with the new M180 on the eastern side of Brigg. That will mean a complete new road of a high standard connecting the port of Grimsby with all the main centres of population in the North and, further down, with the Al and M1.
We are also putting on the improved Al8 a stretch which will be called the Immingham spur, which will connect the existing A160 to the A18 and give direct and much better communication for the port of Immingham via the M180 and the A18 to the main motorway network. The double port, to use the hon. Gentleman's term, of Grimsby and Immingham will have direct high-quality connections with the motorway system. Therefore, his second point is not true either.
Indeed, the strategy, as it deserves to be called because of the considerable thought and effort which have gone into it, is based on a clear regional strategy for Yorkshire and Humberside which involves improving the road communications to the Humber ports not only in regard to the need for trade with Europe,


which will obviously increase through the eastern ports, but in regard to the industrial potential of these areas. The hon. Member referred to the status of Grimsby and other parts of South Humberside.
This clear policy has been carried through with a remarkable amount of road building. I have recently opened the Brigg bypass, which is part of the M180, and I know the areas very well. I pay tribute to my hon. Friends the Members for Grimsby (Mr. Mitchell) and for Brigg and Scunthorpe (Mr. Ellis), who have pressed hard for the steady progress that we are making, and making very much on time. As the hon. Member knows, road schemes can fall behind time all too often, but I am sure that there is the will on South Humberside to see that the schemes are completed. I am sure that they will be completed on time without too much interruption. Most of them are well on time and will meet the target dates.

Mr. Brotherton: I am sorry that the Minister's hon. Friends are not in the Chamber this evening for this debate. Can he answer the point I made about whether the Department regards Grimsby as a major port? The Department stated recently that it did not regard Grimsby as a major port, and this was one reason why the M180 extension would end at Pywipe.

Mr. Horam: The ports of Immingham and Hull have a higher throughput in terms of tonnage and volume of business than Grimsby. Therefore, they get a different status and a different category of treatment. It is really a matter of wording. We have provided and will provide, in conjunction with the Humberside County Council, a good system of road communications for Grimsby. That is what matters. It does not matter whether the road is called a trunk road or a county road as long as it serves adequately the needs of road hauliers and traffic using the port. In that context Grimsby will be extremely well served.

Mr. Brotherton: I make no apology for pressing this. According to the British Transport Docks Board, the port is known as the port of Immingham and Grimsby. The twin ports are regarded as one, and they make an enormous profit for the

Board. How can the Minister say that he regards Grimsby in a different light from Immingham?

Mr. Horam: The argument for putting Grimsby in a different category is a matter of simple fact in terms of tonnage. The hon. Gentleman himself confirmed that when he said that Grimsby was the secondary port of Grimsby and Immingham. It should be stressed, however, that Grimsby and Immingham need to have good road communications. The plans that I have indicated—the M180, the A18, the Immingham spur and West Marsh relief road—will connect the ports of Immingham and Grimsby directly by good, high-quality roads to the motorway network. That is what matters. Whether the road is called a trunk road, a motorway or a county road is immaterial as long as it is a good road that serves the purpose. In that respect, the particular category of port is also irrelevant. What matters is the communications.
We are providing on the north bank the M62, which gives excellent east-west communications from coast to coast for North Humberside. In South Humberside we are providing the M180, which will improve communications east-west along South Humberside. Furthermore, it will tie in with the M1 and the Al via the M18. That itself will provide north-south communications. The Humber Bridge also fits into that scene because it will connect the M62 with the M180. In addition—this is the kernel of the hon. Gentleman's argument—the M180 will continue via the Alb and via the West Marsh relief road and the Immingham spur to connect the ports of Grimsby and Immingham with the main motorway network.
There is also a scheme for improving the Al5 route to link the Humber Bridge southern approaches with the M180. That is now under construction. Furthermore, there are plans to extend that improvement to the A15 to link it south near the county boundary—namely, the junction of Lincolnshire and South Humberside, south of Redbourne. That relates to the north-south communications.
There is also the Louth bypass, and I am surprised that the hon. Gentleman did not mention it at any length. As he knows, we have a scheme for improving that bypass, which is most important to


the town. It is a lovely town with an important and attractive area in the centre, containing many listed buildings, including the famous St. James's Church.

Mr. Brotherton: The Minister will realise that I did not mention the Louth bypass because I was talking about roads in South Humberside, not about roads in Lincolnshire.

Mr. Horam: But the hon. Gentleman will appreciate that the A16 passes from South Humberside through Lincolnshire on its way south to Stamford. That important north-south road has been scheduled for comprehensive improvement and was put into the preparation pool for such improvement as long ago as September 1975. One or two improvements have already taken place to the north of Louth. The Louth bypass is now a subject for discussion and work by the Department and there will shortly be public consultation on the various alternative proposals in that respect. There will be other improvements on that general line of route. That is something that matters not only to Lincolnshire and to Louth but also to traffic from other parts of the country to South Humberside and the ports of Grimsby and Immingham.
Perhaps I may give a little detail on the progress of the M180. The Brigg bypass, which I opened last summer in the presence of my hon. Friend the Member for Brigg and Scunthorpe, was completed in September 1977. The remainder is now all under construction and will be opened in stages as lengths are connected at either end when the existing highway system is completed. The section between Thorne and the A161 is expected to be finished by October this year. We hope to finish the section from the A161 to Scunthorpe, including the Trent bridge crossing to the A18, by January 1979 and the Scunthorpe southern bypass by the same date
Subject, therefore, to some difficulty over the Trent bridge, where there have been one or two genuine problems which the contractor has come across, that whole stretch of the A180 motorway and the central east-west communication for South Humberside will be open for use at the beginning of 1979. That will provide in many respects a high-quality road. In some places it will be a three-lane carriageway and for other short sec-

tions it will be a two-lane carriageway, but all of it will be dual carriageway. Much if it will relieve existing small villages and towns, such as Brigg, and other places along the route from what have been decades of severe traffic congestion.
When I opened the bypass, I was told that people in Brigg could not hear themselves talk in the shops along the High Street because of the volume of traffic that daily threaded its way through the town. That affects the environment and quality of life of the people of the area which are as important as the industrial needs of ports and the general industrial infrastructure of South Humberside.
The A18 continues to make progress on schedule. The draft line order for the A18 Brigg to Grimsby road was published in December 1977 and the draft side roads order was published a few days ago. There were 30 objections to the line order, mostly from landowners, and they included suggestions for an alternative route. My hon. Friends the Members for Grimsby and for Brigg and Scunthorpe have been so anxious that we should make progress that they have suggested we should cut public consultation to a minimum, but there have been 30 objections and it will be necessary to hold a public inquiry, probably in the autumn of this year. This will add a little time to the project, though it will still be within the schedule of progress that we have mapped out. The inevitable price of proper consultation with local people is that we must consider their legitimate objections. We considered that a public inquiry would probably be necessary and we allowed sufficient time for it. There will be no putting back of the date when the road will be in being.
The new A18 Brigg to Grimsby trunk road will be about 13¾ miles long and will have dual two-lane carriageways. The new trunk road link—the Immingham spur—will be about a mile long and will have a single two-lane carriageway. The total cost of the new A18 will be £27 million, and if progress goes according to schedule, as it should, we shall have it completed by the end of 1981.
If one considers the figures that I have mentioned for these roads, one can see the quality of the road infrastructure going into South Humberside. The hon.


Gentleman is being totally unfair to the Government. Many parts of the country would be glad of the sort of treatment that we are rightly giving to South Humberside, and the industrial infrastructure will benefit accordingly. I have not even mentioned some of the other schemes that are being carried out in the area; for example, the A15 connection from the M180 to the Humber Bridge, which will cost £8·3 million, all granted by the Department. That is proceeding on schedule in three sections, is timed to open with the Humber Bridge, and will play its part in building a proper system for North and South Humberside.
The hon. Gentleman should acknowledge what is being done by way of road improvements in South Humberside. On any objective analysis, considerable improvements are being made and South Humberside is getting a very good deal. I am sure that those who travel in the area and who have had to put up with a great deal in the past can see from the sheer volume of building that is taking place and the plans in hand that they are getting a really good deal.

Question put and agreed to.

Adjourned accordingly at twenty minutes to Two o'clock.